Stephen Hough - String Quartet No. 1 (Les Six Recontres) (2021) [Score-VIdeo]

Stephen Hough - String Quartet No. 1 (Les Six Recontres) (2021)

I. Au boulevard
II. Au parc
III. À l'hôtel
IV. Au théâtre
V. À l'église
VI. Au marché

Takács Quartet

Program Note: Stephen Hough’s String Quartet No 1 was specifically composed as a companion piece to Ravel's String Quartet and Dutilleux's Ainsi la nuit, and it is dedicated to the Takács Quartet. It was first performed at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California, on 8 December 2021, played by the Takács Quartet. In conceiving his quartet as a piece to be heard alongside Ravel and Dutilleux, Hough writes in the preface to the score that he set out to explore ‘not so much what united their musical languages but what was absent from them’. He explains that the work’s subtitle, Les Six rencontres, ‘has in it a pun and a puzzle: the six movements as an echo of “Les Six”, although there are no quotes or direct references from those composers; and “encounters” which are unspecified, their phantom occurrence leaving only a trace in the memory of the places where the meetings might have taken place’. The significance of the Groupe des Six (Poulenc, Honegger, Milhaud, Auric, Durey and Tailleferre) in the origins of Hough’s quartet lies in something less tangible: for him, their music ‘evokes a flavour more than a style’, and he adds:
It’s a flavour rarely found in the music of Ravel and Dutilleux. In Les Six it’s not so much a lack of seriousness, although seeing life through a burlesque lens is one recurring ingredient; rather it’s an aesthetic re-view of the world after the catastrophe of the Great War. Composers like Poulenc and Milhaud were able to discover poignance in the rough and tumble of daily human life in a way which escaped the fastidiousness of those other two composers.
The composer himself is the surest guide to the substance and mood of each movement. About ‘Au boulevard’, he writes that ‘Stravinskian spikes elbow across the four instruments, with jagged accents, darting arpeggios and bracing white-note harmonies … the main theme is suddenly transformed into technicolor for the central section, blushed with sentiment and exactly half-tempo.’ In ‘Au parc’, ‘under a pizzicato accompaniment a gentle, melancholy melody floats and is passed around the players in a haze of decorative variations’, while ‘À l’hôtel’ opens with ‘a bustling fugato, its short subject incorporating repeated notes, an arpeggio and a scale’ and ends with ‘offbeat, snapping chords in pursuit’. ‘Au théâtre’ reveals a ‘skeleton of a motif [which] dances in a recurring harmonic sequence, decorated with each repetition in more and more lurid colours, smeared with lipstick glissandos’, before a change of mood is ushered in by the viola, ‘pushing the music forward to a splashing climax’, followed by a despairing reprise and a conciliatory close. Hough describes ‘À l’église’ as a ‘serene hymn’ for muted strings, while ‘Au marché’ is a bustling moto perpetuo which recalls earlier material and finally returns to the music from the opening of the work.

from notes by Nigel Simeone © 2023

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