As if being the greatest oboist of the past half century wasn’t enough, in the past 10 years or so Heinz Holliger has been recognised as one of the most significant European composers of his generation, too. One of the pieces that cemented Holliger’s reputation was the violin concerto he completed in 1995 for Thomas Zehetmair, and now he has written a string quartet for the group Zehetmair leads. They gave the first performance two weeks ago in Cologne, and included the UK premiere in their Wigmore programme, framed by Schubert’s E flat Quartet D 87 and the third and last of Schumann’s Op 41 set.
Dedicated to Elliott Carter, Holliger’s String Quartet No 2 is a single movement, lasting about 23 minutes but falling into six sections. The composer’s brief programme note talked about the burden of history weighing on anyone who attempted to compose a string quartet as one of the reasons why the new work was separated by 34 years from his First Quartet, which he describes as “much criticised”. That’s unlikely to be the fate of this piece, though, which is absorbing.
Three sections are headed by quotations from Hölderlin and Celan. They are not further explained, but the trajectory of the piece is straightforward. Beginning with glassy, densely packed harmonics, it moves seamlessly through a crepuscular slow section and a trembling perpetuum mobile to arrive at the finale, labelled as a “12-part epilogue in three parts”, in which the members of the quartet sing four of the lines over the double-stops on their instruments. It is a wonderfully unearthly effect, and a genuine summation; the Zehetmairs manage it wonderfully, too, but then they are an exceptional group.
