Edinburgh festival


Auryn Quartet

Queen's Hall, Edinburgh
4 out of 5 4

Morton Feldman's Second String Quartet is one of the record-breaking masterpieces of 20th-century music. The longest string quartet ever written - it clocks in at around five hours - it's also one of the largest spans of continuous music ever conceived. But the Auryn Quartet's performance at the Edinburgh festival made the piece more than a freakish musical statistic; this was a monumental, mind-boggling experience.

Feldman's music is famously slow and quiet, but the Second String Quartet contained a striking expressive variety. There were delicate harmonics, fragile melodies and tiny, haunting dissonances, but there were also passages of energetic music and loud attacks. Over the course of the Auryn's performance, these extrovert moments were aural landmarks, familiar features in a vast and unpredictable musical landscape.

If playing the piece was a physical and psychological feat, listening to it was a draining experience. It took time to attune to Feldman's musical world and to adjust to the central paradox of the quartet: the way that, despite its incomprehensible scale, the piece is constructed out of individual, fleeting moments. At the beginning of the performance, it seemed inconceivable that the work could project a sense of shape over so large a canvas - yet perceptual patterns did start to emerge.

Recognisable fragments returned and were transformed: a halting oscillation between two notes, a dense, chromatic texture. Once we were locked into the work's musical flow, we experienced a sort of gargantuan gentleness, an uplifting enhancement of time.

By the end, an even stranger psychological phenomenon had taken place: a sense of the brevity of the piece. Time passes in Feldman's music like it does in real life: as a procession of repeated patterns and rituals that slowly change. The five hours of the quartet provided an insight into a universe of experience, another way of seeing the world that had become seductive and compelling. It left the audience longing for the six-hour version.

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