The Arditti Quartet performed two “sets” last night at Le Poisson Rouge, the Greenwich Village club that has become New York City’s hot go-to spot for new music in a casual cabaret atmosphere. The presentation was more formal than usual for the club, closer in atmosphere to an evening at Zankel Hall that a hip music venue.

The first “set” featured three works written for the Ardittis.

Harrison Birtwistle’s The Tree of Strings (String Quartet No.2) received its US premiere with this performance, but without the stage directions the work usually calls for (the players on movable seats that add a dramatic and spatial element to the last movement). The work as a whole breathes a bit more than his music from the late 1980s and 1990s, and the intense rhythmic final section, filled with contrapuntal jousting amongst the four players, has moments that at once suggest jazz and the American music it spawned before dissolving into separate, interjecting repetitive strophes that wind down one at a time to nothingness. Irvine Arditti preceded the performance of Conlon Nancarrow’s String Quartet No.3 with the story of how the quartet was essentially given the third quartet by the iconoclastic composer — and why there is no Quartet No.2 (evidently, it had been promised to another quartet but never written or completed). Like Nancarrow’s inimitable music for player piano, this music is filled with canonic tonal lines colliding in different but mathematically related tempos; the manic stretti of the outer movements contrasted with the calm, atmospheric middle movement, hints of Virgil Thomson and Henry Cowell coming to the surface. The Ardittis finished the set with one of the most daunting works in the quartet repertoire, Xenakis’s Tetras, a rigorously structured barrage of movements rich in the composer’s signature glissandi and tone clusters branching from single notes, rendered using extended techniques and sounds — and also containing moments of uncharacteristic humor and Carteresque rhetoric.

Composer-pianist Uri Caine joined the quartet in the second set for a series of short works for string quartet with improvised piano accompaniment. The works were individually reminiscent of various twentieth century styles  — the outer works were more than a little reminiscent of Schoenberg with more rhythmic impetus, and one particularly tuneful, slow work brought to mind what might happen if Alec Wilder wrote in the style of young Samuel Barber.  Caine indulged his jazz and improvisatory side with remarkable sensitivity, occasionally punctuating the music with pointillist commentary, sometimes acting as a “continuo” to the quartet, and in one of the later works, performing a tone-cluster jazz “cadenza” with delightful intrusiveness. Caine is an imaginative composer and solid pianist, and the music was consisitently entertaining and surprising.

I will be reviewing tonight’s performance of a new work by Wolfgang Rihm featuring the Ardittis in collaborative performance with the Hilliard Ensemble for Classical Source tomorrow.