Carl Vine on the Tokyo String Quartet
Composer and Musica Viva artistic director Carl Vine is getting several (not-quite) world premieres this month, courtesy of the Tokyo String Quartet
By Jason Catlett
Like most lovers of chamber music, you're a fan of "the Tokyos," aren't you? I've always regarded them as one of the five best string quartets of the second half of 20th century. I could happily listen to them playing the phone book. When I came to Musica Viva they hadn't played here for years, so I was desperate to get them to Australia.
Who are the other four great quartets? The Alban Berg and the Guaneri, both of which have stopped playing, plus the Takács and the Emerson Quartet.
What makes a quartet great? First of all, everything technical must be 100 per cent perfect. That's a given. But most of them who are 100 per cent perfect are not even in the top rung – they're merely very good. You have to make the music sound inevitable, as if there is no other way it could be heard, and that what you're hearing is the genuine article. And thirdly, there's a matter of being on the edge of the seat – both the players and the audience. The Tokyos are still doing that: two of the members have been there since 1971, two of the members are more recent, but they're still keeping everyone on the edge of their seat.
The two Sydney concerts each include a late Beethoven Quartet. Is that their long suit? One of the advantages of having the Tokyo Quartet playing these works than one the younger quartets is that they've been playing them for 40 years. They've made enough mistakes that they can take chances and know where the chances are going to go, but it's still spontaneous.
They're also playing your Fifth String Quartet. What's it like? It's not a bad work. I'm happy to have it in the concert season. I'm intrigued to see what the Tokyos do with it.
The work has already been recorded by the Goldner Quartet, so is this a premiere? It's the first performance by the Tokyos. Plus I've added a new movement. I'm a massive advocate of second performances. I've had world premieres of my own work that bear no relationship to the written score.
That happened famously to Stravinsky. How did it happen to you? The conductor gave the orchestra half an hour's rehearsal, saw that it wasn't going to work, didn't care, and just had them sight-read it. And nobody in the audience was any the wiser, they just thought it was an awful piece of music. As did I, and I wrote it! But here the Tokyos will tour the various capital cities, so by the time they get back to Sydney for their second concert, they will have performed it eight times.
Do you consider your music Australian? I don't believe there is such a thing. It doesn't sound like emus or didgeridoos or cockatoos. I've always been urban, and I probably related more to England than I did to Australia, as most Australians of my generation did. My dream was always of going to London, until I actually got there and discovered what kind of a place it was, and came home very happily. In this day and age, global boundaries are irrelevant. Australian music to me reflects everything.
What do you aim for when you compose? I always try to make my music dramatic, and to have a kind of theatrical propulsion to it. But I don't use external stimuli: I don't base it on a poem, picture novels et cetera. The best is pure music. It's not narrative, it's simply musical drama.
What do you mean by musical drama? Music is about conflict and resolution, whether it's a leading note going to a final chord, or a complex chord moving to a simple chord. Melodies have similar resolutions. Put this together and you have a drama without a story. You have a conflict resolution about something that is entirely intangible. That to me is the most fascinating thing about music.
Why should anyone buy a ticket for a concert rather than a CD? What you get from being in the same room as the musicians, so close you can smell them, is that you become, for that short while, part of a shared world. And it's a very beautiful world, sharing some of the greatest constructions of the human mind with some of the world's greatest executors of that music.
Tokyo String Quartet perform at the City Recital Hall on Sat 13 and Mon 22 Jun.
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