Four Quartets, Written by One Man Over Half a Century

After the premiere of his String Quartet No. 1, played in New York by the Juilliard Quartet in 1950, the composer Leon Kirchner, then 31, was approached backstage by a mysterious man.

“You have written the Seventh Quartet,” the man said, as Mr. Kirchner related the story on Wednesday night at Alice Tully Hall before performances of his four quartets by the Orion String Quartet.

The man turned out to be Joseph Szigeti, the great Hungarian violinist, a good friend and frequent recital partner of Bartok’s. Mr. Kirchner immediately knew what Mr. Szigeti had meant by his cryptic comment.

Bartok composed the sixth and last of his string quartets in 1939. These seminal works were not widely known in 1950, except among composers and devotees of contemporary music. In this First Quartet by a young American, Mr. Szigeti had discovered a successor to Bartok. Mr. Kirchner, who was indeed enthralled with Bartok, took that as a tremendous compliment, he said.

This work brought Mr. Kirchner wide attention. In the years that followed, he became one of America’s leading composers and teachers. In 1989, after a 28-year career at Harvard, he retired, and he now lives in New York. At 88, the avuncular Mr. Kirchner provided insights into the genesis of his quartets, talking onstage with the composer Bruce Adolphe before the concert, presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

The four Kirchner quartets were written over 57 years. The Second, steeped in the music of Schoenberg, Mr. Kirchner’s influential teacher, came in 1958. The Third, from 1966, scored for string quartet and electronic tape, earned Mr. Kirchner a Pulitzer Prize for music. The Fourth, composed last year (commissioned in part by the society and the Orion Quartet), was given its premiere in August by the Orion players in San Diego. This was its New York premiere.

Hearing these works complete, a listener could only find it inexplicable that they have not secured solid places in the repertory of the more adventurous quartets. Indeed, none of the pieces had previously been presented on a Chamber Music Society program.

The First Quartet does seem awash in the sound world and harmonic idiom of Bartok. Still, for the young Mr. Kirchner, Bartok was just a starting point, a prod to inspiration. With its industrious contrapuntal writing, harmonic astringency, sometimes jazzy restlessness and spaciously ruminative lyricism, the music has a personal voice that is hard to describe but impossible to miss.

Though mainstream concertgoers would peg him as an atonal composer, and though he was profoundly affected by Schoenberg, Mr. Kirchner never bought into strict 12-tone procedures, always wanting to work from instinct. While indebted to Schoenberg, the Second Quartet comes across like some confident modern-day American composer’s ingenious riff on a Neo-Classical Schoenberg quartet.

With its sci-fi touches, the taped element that Mr. Kirchner incorporates into his Third Quartet may strike some as a little quaint today: oscillating figurations, percolating plunks and bloops, kazoolike slides, birdlike whistles, rapid-fire explosions of skittish pitches. But Mr. Kirchner deftly uses the taped sounds to complement the strings in an organic, boldly episodic and formidable work.

The new quartet, a stunningly tumultuous and compact piece of just 12 minutes, synthesizes many elements of Mr. Kirchner’s language. Actually, none of his quartets last longer than 20 minutes. Every gesture in these works came across as pared-down and essential, at least in these incisive, brilliant and beautiful performances.

The four Kirchner quartets would fit on a single CD. And there were surely many potential purchasers among those who nearly filled the hall this night and cheered the grateful composer.