A work 64 years in the making

Pierre Boulez must not have gotten the memo about a work of art never being finished, merely abandoned. Boulez, who died last year at age 90, had the hardest time letting go of his works.

Take “Livre Pour Quatuor,” Révisé (“Book for Quartet,” Revised), his only string quartet, which took 64 years to edit. A portion of the piece was given its premiere by the Paris-based Diotima Quartet as part of the Jacaranda music series Saturday night at First Presbyterian Church in Santa Monica.

Boulez was 80 when he worked on revising “Livre” with the Diotima Quartet — violinist Yun-Peng Zhao, violist Franck Chevalier and cellist Pierre Morlet, cellist. (Second violinist Constance Ronzatti had not yet replaced Guillaume Latour.) Together they found ways of moderating some of the rhythmic extremes of the music Boulez composed in 1948, even letting a bit of coloristic warmth into the firebrand’s largely cerebral score.

Because the title, “Livre,” refers to book pages that can be detached and reordered, Boulez approved of partial performances. The Diotima Quartet allowed the austere piece to unfold organically with exacting and subtle application of tone color while maintaining Boulez’s incisive rhythms.

The shortest Jacaranda concert in my memory also featured quartets by Eric Tanguy, Hugh Levick and Henri Dutilleux. At just under 90 minutes, the program emerged as a powerful reminder that less can be a lot more.

The opening piece, Tanguy’s affectionate Quartet No. 2 (2000), received an expert reading from Diotima. It’s a score contoured in the manner of Debussy and Ravel, French to its roots.

Levick’s jazzy 15-minute “Saxophone for String Quartet” (No. 4) had its U.S. premiere. Levick, who founded and directs L.A.’s Hear Now Music Festival, attempts to graft jazz techniques onto a traditional string quartet with mixed results. Although the work never quite found a convincing stylistic continuity, it did give the players a chance to display a more naked virtuosity, including a solo passage for violist Chevalier, a bass-like solo for cellist Morlet and a rhythmic section in which the ensemble, navigating changing time signatures, suggested a drum solo.

The program closed with a luminous rendition of Dutilleux’s only quartet, “Ainsi la Nuit” (“Thus the Night”).

As this concert suggested, the Diotima Quartet is an invaluable, eloquent advocate for even the most challenging of modern scores.

Give the group a listen. It returns to Jacaranda on Saturday for a program of works by Schoenberg, Webern and Berg.