Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
It has been a long time since a major work by Robert Saxton received its first performance in London. Saxton has spent much of the last decade working on his radio opera The Wandering Jew, which was finally aired last year. His Third String Quartet, commissioned by the Southbank Centre and introduced by the Ardittis as the centrepiece of their programme, marks his return to writing for the concert hall.
A 17-minute work in five movements, it sustains itself more through carefully planned tonal architecture than through striking musical ideas. There is a central scurrying scherzo flanked by a more striking pair of static slow movements, while the rather dense string polyphony and slowly rotating harmony of the opening and closing sections, respectively, recall an earlier generation of 20th-century English composers. Although the Ardittis lavished all their usual attention to detail upon it, there was something rather inconsequential about it all.
There was much more substance in the pieces by Kaija Saariaho and Harrison Birtwistle. Whether by accident or design, both works explored notions of memory and remembering. In Saariaho's Terra Memoria, the way in which some recollections remain fixed and unchanging, while others transform over time, provides the raison d'etre. Her piece is full of beautifully imagined string textures, even if few of them, ironically enough, conjure up genuinely memorable images.
Birtwistle's The Tree of Strings – an evocation of what might have survived of a lost musical culture on the Hebridean island of Raasay – is starting to emerge as one of his finest recent achievements. Heard in London for the first time tonight, it seems to reveal more mysteries and beauties with every performance, and the Ardittis played it wonderfully.