Arditti quartet display inspirational authority

Quartet No 2 - Krzysztof Penderecki

Quartet No 5 - Elliott Carter

Quartet No 3 - James Dillon

Silent Flower - Toshio Hosokawa

Quartet No 2 - Gyorgy Ligeti

Sonorities, Belfast's festival of contemporary music, is currently re-inventing itself as a series of events spaced out during the year. Last weekend, the festival took the Ulster Orchestra appearance by Krzysztof Penderecki as a launching pad for related events: a public interview with the composer, a student performance of his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, a concert focusing on Polish electroacoustic music, and, most significantly, a concert by the Arditti String Quartet.

The originally advertised programme included both of Penderecki's quartets, the one actually performed included only the second. This work from 1968 finds the composer in the experimental mode that had been sparked off in the late 1950s when music from the West began to percolate into Poland, and the young composer had the opportunity of working in the electronic studio. From the sliding cluster at the start, through the various unorthodox playing techniques, this is a piece which exemplifies the sort of sonic explorations with which Penderecki's name is still most closely associated. The Ardittis included a second work from the same year, Ligeti's Second, a piece which stands as a sort of summation of the composer's achievement at that time.

The evening was completed by three quartets from the 1990s. Elliott Carter's Fifth (1995) attempts to embody in its writing and structure some of the modes of musicians in rehearsal. James Dillon's Third (1998) boasts vividly intersecting material that articulates concepts expounded in a programme note that left some listeners gasping for a dictionary. Toshio Hosokawa's Silent Flowers (1998) explores sonic gestures close to silence, triggered by a mixture of Japanese and European influences - Ikebana and Noh plays, and the music of Webern and Nono, music which the composer sees as "flowers that bloom on a bed of silence". The programme was delivered with that inspirational authority which has become the trademark of the Ardittis in their chosen repertoire.