Like such modern masters as Tippett, Carter and Messiaen, all born in the early years of this century, Giacinto Scelsi (1905–88) came to realize that the musical language of his first maturity required radical revision if it were not to lapse into sterility. The crisis, which for Scelsi involved a period of physical and mental breakdown, came in the late 1940s. The consequence was radical indeed, and the earlier and later Scelsis are both remarkable, demanding the serious attention that recordings are at last beginning to make possible.
As the First Quartet of 1944 reveals, the earlier Scelsi was in many ways traditional in form and style, but the work is far from cravenly beholden to obvious influences, and convincingly sustains its substantial length—more than 30 minutes. The gently consonant ending expresses the vision of a future that Scelsi himself would reject. That he did not immediately dismiss the fluent, fantastical thematicism of the quartet is clear from the Divertimento No. 3 and Coelocanth (both 1955), included on the Accord disc; transitional works that threaten to grow diffuse but prove to be triumphs of inventive musical shaping.
After such memorable early compositions the question is bound to arise: did the later Scelsi give up too much? The contrast is certainly extreme, as the Trio (1958) demonstrates: in place of free-wheeling, wide-ranging ideas and textures, there is the kind of microtonal meditation around single, sustained pitches that evokes exotic musics and non-Western rituals. The potential for sinking into static minimalism is undoubtedly there, and some movements of the longer works, such as the Second and Third Quartets (1961 and 1963) do not completely avoid—or seek to avoid?—that effect.
In general, however, Scelsi maintains the kind of gradually evolving textural process satisfying to ears that yearn for argument as well as atmosphere. Above all, as the vocal work Khoom (1962) makes especially clear, Scelsi's sense of drama rarely deserts him, and I've found the later, shorter quartets and string pieces the most accessible precisely because in them drama and contemplation interact most effectively. In the Fifth Quartet, in particular, a slow yet steady evolution over just six and a half minutes is managed with the finest aural imagination and formal control—the more cogently, I suspect, because of the importance of short silences as a structural feature.
The Arditti Quartet recorded the first four quartets for the Fore 80 label in the early 1980s (nla), and these new performances are wonderfully faithful to the uncompromising spirit of the later Scelsi. The Accord performance of the Trio seems by comparison—at least in the first movement—too anxious to smooth-out the glowing austerity of the texture: but in any case this disc's main claim to attention comes from its collection of solo pieces and the fascinating duo, Elegia per Ty.
The two sets overlap in one other respect. Harry Halbreich provides the notes for both, and invaluable though they are, they do tend to cover similar ground in similar words. The Accord sound is more forwardly placed and more resonant than the Salabert Actuels, and I found the latter marginally more natural and appropriate for this haunting music.'