Six String Quartets, Takac Quartet

Bartók, Béla

album cover

The Shape-Shifting Genius of Bartók

Like a film director working without a script, Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881–1945) follows an impulsive, nonlinear path through these six astounding pieces for string quartet, which represent a peak of twentieth-century music. He rarely stays in any one key center for long. His themes tumble out, sometimes getting discarded immediately and sometimes coalescing into purposeful ensemble bursts, occasionally piling on top of each other like a multicar crash on the freeway.

Written between 1908 (when the composer was twenty-seven) and 1939, the String Quartets outline the arc of Bartók's progression from dutiful post-romanticist to folklorist to one of the most original composers of all time. He was hardly the only composer to investigate folk forms, but unlike most, he did not settle for the quaint and pretty endearments that had already been anthologized. Bartók strapped a gramophone onto the back of a donkey and headed for the most remote Transylvanian villages to get the tunes down exactly, and what he came back with was gritty, cranky, idiosyncratic stuff, which he used as the springboard for his later musical investigations. Today, such an investigation seems smart and in some ways inevitable; when Bartók began, many considered it a folly.

Bartók integrates the folk material stealthily, often picking up the swirl of a dance or emulating, in the picky string pizzicato passages he marked "barbaro," the rhythmic cadence of a century-old vocal tune. He's never gratuitous, and he never slums. He sometimes replicates the emotions underpinning the folk themes in total, but is more often inclined to fracture them, creating music that is supremely beautiful one minute (the nighttime mist that envelops the third movement of No. 4) and jarringly disruptive (the torrid first movement of No. 6) the next.

The Hungarian Takac Quartet relishes Bartók's extremes. While it catches and celebrates the idiosyncracies in the score, it manages to give the composer's knotty, imposing structures a good airing out—rendering this heavy music with an animated brightness that's more typically associated with children's songs.

Genre: Classical
Released: 1998, Decca
Key Tracks: No. 4.
Another Interpretation: Emerson String Quartet
Catalog Choice: Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Fritz Reiner, cond.)
Next Stop: Kronos Quartet: Night Prayers (Music by Joan Jeanrenaud)
After That: Osvaldo Golijov: Oceana
Book Pages: 46–49