The programme notes for the Ardittis' recital would have driven campaigners for plain English to the brink. Here was Brian Ferneyhough describing his Fifth Quartet as a "claustrophobic and marginally chaotic renegotiation of mutual priorities", while Pascal Dusapin, writing about his quartet (also No 5), talked of "successive aporia that form so many episodes of affable prepossessing small talk that is at once destroyed by a strategy of ruination".
Ignore the verbiage and both works are impressive, sharply contrasted achievements. Ferneyhough's quartet, first performed by the Arditti in May last year and receiving its London premiere here, is a typically dense, ferociously complex single movement that weaves three kinds of material into a constantly developing fabric that pivots about the central coruscating cello solo. After all the sound and fury, though, the work ends quietly with gentle undulations and some glassy chords as beautiful as anything Ferneyhough has composed.
Dusapin's work (a UK premiere) was inspired by Beckett's early novel Mercier et Camier, and is as expansive and ruminative as the Ferneyhough is terse and tense. Starting out with a dreamy dialogue between top and bottom, the two violins against the viola and cello, it never really goes anywhere, but does so in a rewarding, pleasantly discursive way.
Luca Francesconi's fourth quartet I Voli di Niccolo (another UK premiere) buries fragments of Paganini in virtuoso writing that constantly seems about to break into rustic dance. In the context of this programme, Gyorgy Kurtag's Moments Musicaux, still less than two years old, took on the status of a classic. The Arditti played the six little pieces with fabulous concentration, making every silence speak volumes, but then their command of every challenge this programme threw at them was astonishing.