REVIEW: Takács Quartet Gives a Masterclass in Bartók
October 21, 2019
By Brian Taylor
The string quartet, going back to Beethoven, is often considered a composer’s purest, most personal, statement. This fall, 92Y launches two cycles of seminal twentieth century cases: Bartók and Shostakovich. The latter’s fifteen revered quartets will be performed by the Borodin Quartet over two years and five concerts at the 92Y, beginning Tuesday, Nov. 5, but his work may owe something to Bartók, whose six seminal quartets, appropriately, were presented across two evenings by the world’s pre-eminent interpreter of them, the Takács Quartet.
The Takács Quartet, founded in Hungary in 1975, is the quintessential chamber music ensemble. Cellist András Fejér is the sole remaining founding member. His committed, colorful bowing is a joy to behold. The British Edward Dusinberre, first violin since 1993, is an elegant player, with a wide tonal palette to match. To his left, Harumi Rhodes joined as second violin last year, and contributes fresh, vibrant energy. Violist Geraldine Walther, who accesses warmth and darkness with equal inspiration, will soon retire. I was lucky to catch them now, especially, in what might be considered their trademark works.
I heard the even-numbered quartets, all three of which could be described as gloomy. But these pieces —from the 1917 Second Quartet, produced at the height of WWI, to the grim Sixth from 1939 — focus our attention to Bartók’s personal response to an era in Europe at its most frightening and oppressive.
The Takács Quartet deserves their reputation as a model of collaboration. Each of them is truly present. You can feel them actively listening and responding to each other. The leadership shifts, moment to moment, as the music dictates. And they transcend whatever makes this thorny music difficult to play, distilling Bartók’s quartets to their essence.
The Fourth Quartet is a model of study for composition students, partly because of the unorthodox extended techniques Bartók employs. Slides, snapping effects known as “Bartók pizzicato,” and so forth. However, it would be a mistake to focus on the window-dressing. Certainly the most enjoyable of this set, the Fourth’s acerbic language achieves visceral nirvana. Much is made of the composer’s fascination with symmetry, and its place in the formal structure of this 1928 piece. But cohesive, abstract expression is what really speaks in this quartet, and Takács attacked the canvas with the confidence of a painter communicating in precise, obtuse gestures. The all-pizzicato fourth movement was prickly and incisive.
The Second Quartet that opened the program finds Bartók holding his own against such contemporaries as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s crisis of tonality. Yet, he forged a chromatic path of his own with a unique musical language that never fully abandoned tonality. He was a collector of folk melody; even when the time for melodies warped, as current events became impossible to sing about, musical motives retain their memory.
The finale of the mournful Sixth Quartet exemplified the Takács Quartet’s achievement. Probing, unresolvable lines, meandering around an ineffable tonal center in a trance-like, yearning prayer. Four players in exquisite unity of expression teetered at the edge of ambiguity; Bartók peering out at an uncertain future. The audience was rapt. Very few art forms can render tension so palpably.
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