Touted as China’s “first avant-garde composer”, Ge Gan-Ru is a name which I had not encountered before the release of Fall of Baghdad – String Quartets Nos. 1, 4 and 5 performed by ModernWorks. Born in Shanghai in 1954, his violin studies were interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. In 1974 when the Shanghai Conservatory re-opened he returned, switching his major to composition three years later. His first major work, Yi Feng (Lost Style) for “radically detuned cello”, was received with consternation and criticism, but established him as a pioneer. This was followed by his first string quartet Fu (Prose-Poem) which was a work-in-progress when he was invited to New York to study with Chou Wen-chung at Columbia University in 1982. Fu was picked up by the Kronos Quartet shortly after its completion and Ge went on to receive his doctorate from Columbia in 1991 and continues to live in the USA. This CD presents distinctly different quartets from 1983 (Fu), 1998 (Angel Suite) and 2007 (The Fall of Baghdad), providing glimpses into the development of this multi-faceted and culturally innovative composer.

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As a young man, Ge Gan-Ru came from Shanghai after the end of the Cultural Revolution to study in the United States. He's still here, turning out works that mix elegance and violent gestures in equal measure.

The three string quartets on this new release reveal Ge to be an heir of Bartók, Penderecki and especially George Crumb in his demands on the players. They make their instruments squeal, howl and whimper. The music shows its Chinese heritage in the way it uses microtones—but when the composer started writing in this style, nobody in his native land had ever done anything nearly this radical in the Western tradition.

The Quartet No. 4, “Angel Suite,” reveals Ge's curiosity about Western religious traditions. The tormented No. 5, “Fall of Baghdad,” shouts its anti-war protest in the most painful ways, and in moments of repose uses musical motifs from the Middle East.

The designation “first Chinese composer of avant-garde music” is such a prescient one that it sets up, perhaps, an unreasonable expectation for Chinese composer Ge Gan-Ru: with every release, one is looking for Ge to come down to earth in some fashion, for worm holes in his silkscreen. Ge only seems to come back stronger and better every time, and for the moment it seems as there’s no stopping him. Naxos’ Ge Gan-Ru: Fall of Baghdad focuses on Ge’s cycle of string quartets (which in August 2009 was up to five in number); this features the group ModernWorks, under the leadership of arch new music cellist Madeleine Shapiro, in the First, Fourth, and Fifth of Ge’s string quartets. From the first, this disc makes clear that Ge’s string quartet cycle is as strong and substantive at least as Nicolas Bacri’s; perhaps as much as Bartók’s.

Ge’s String Quartet No. 1 (1983) is contemporaneous with his well-known cello solo, Lost Style, often identified as the first avant-garde composition to come from China. Subtitled “Fu” (i.e., Prose Poem), he could have just as easily titled it “feu”—French for fire—as that’s how this remarkable and concise movement begins, like an individual tongue of flame lapping up from a stray branch, ultimately building to a blistering conflagration. String Quartet No. 4 (1998) is subtitled “Angel Suite”; with this piece, Ge provides his take on Western tradition. The atmosphere of the fourth quartet is suffused with late romantic-early expressionist style, particularly that of Arnold Schoenberg. But one would never confuse it with Schoenberg; it’s more like Schoenberg as angel and devil in a sort of fin-de-siècle psychodrama scripted by Ibsen, with stage designs by Edvard Münch. Where there have been so many works by Western composers that imitate this general sound only to appear derivative and out of date, Ge has mastered the idiom so well that this not only mirrors it effectively but takes it into another dimension where the image shuttles back and forth between blindingly brilliant colors and hushed, black and white stillness. It is a fabulous piece.

However, for sheer visceral excitement, neither of these quite approach Ge’s String Quartet No. 5, “Fall of Baghdad.” Inspired by George Crumb’s Black Angels, but relating to—ahem—topical events, the opening movement “Abyss—Screaming, Living Hell, Barbaric March” kicks up a fuss that would scare the hell out of Helmut Lachenmann. From there it achieves a sincere and organic dramatic arch made up out of small sections and the string quartet exactly plays out the various parts described—“Bazaar,” “Music from Heaven,” “Desolation”—and so forth. The piece makes use of all kinds of bizarre techniques of tone production, yet never seems to be “about” that; Ge has picked his program, and he sticks to it. This is perhaps the most impressive string quartet written since Bacri’s No. 4, “Omaggio á Beethoven” (1995).

Ge Gan-Ru: Fall of Baghdad is one of the best recordings Naxos has made of anything; it is spit clear, spacious yet intimate, and completely three-dimensional. ModernWorks sounds so terrific that its dedication to the cause of new music only is almost to be regretted; it would be nice to hear the group do Bartók or Schoenberg. Nevertheless, Naxos’ Ge Gan-Ru: Fall of Baghdad, while not for the faint of heart perhaps, will have those who value adventure and an intense musical experience on the edge of their seats, especially listeners who are well acquainted with the quartets of Bartók, Lutoslawski, and other first-class modern works in the modern tradition and have already concluded that there’s no way that relevant, new works in this idiom can be born.

Having now made his home in the United States, where his music is making a significant impact, Ge Gan-Ru is one of China’s new breed of avant-garde composers. Born in Shanghai in 1954, his musical education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, though he was fortunate in being allocated to a folk group that was entertaining workers. With the ending of the Revolution he was admitted to the Shanghai Conservatoire, his graduation finding a composer strongly influenced by Western Music. A move to the United States to further his studies took him to his emotional home, and having supported himself, taking whatever work he could find, he is presently devoting his time to composition. Work had already started on the one-movement First Quartet before leaving China; the Fourth dates from 1998, and the Fifth, his most recent, being completed in 2007 and with the title ‘The Fall of Baghdad’. I can find any number of influences that is driving his music forward, the Fourth, an atonal score where you find Schoenberg, and the Fifth indebted to George Crumb. Try, for starters, the quirky Gnomes and a distorted Prayer  which are the second and third movements of the Fourth. The equally unusual Angel’s March, which concludes the work, quickly drilling itself into your memory bank. I am a little unsure of my response to the very obvious picture painting in the Fifth, where the invasion of Iraq is seen as one of great suffering. Quartets with such scenarios usually have a short shelf-life, the unmusical finale intentionally making for unpleasant listening. The performances by the string ensemble taken from a larger New York group, ModernWorks, is highly persuasive in furthering Ge’s career, and again we have another masterpiece of record engineering from Naxos’s Canada team.