Two or three minutes before the lights went down
at Harris Hall in Aspen, Colo., a curious thing happened. The packed
audience, which spilled onto the stage, stopped conversing and settled
back in silence, waiting for the Emerson
Quartet to emerge and begin a two-night traversal
of all six of Bela Bartok's string quartets.
Even though there had been no signal, no dimming of
the lights, no closing of the doors, this Aspen Music Festival audience
was simply ready for something special. They knew, because the Emerson
Quartet spends its summers in residence here, that these musicians are
uniquely suited to Bartok's colorful, rhythmic, challenging music. The
Emersons are famous for their technical proficiency and unanimity of
interpretation, but they also can delve deep and find the music's soul.
For these performances, they broke from string quartet
tradition and stood like soloists (all except cellist David Finckel,
of course). If the idea was to free up the music, it worked. This quartet
has performed Bartok often, including several occasions on which they
played all six in one marathon evening. They won two Grammys for their
1989 recording of the set, including Best Classical Album. As one would
hope, their clarity of interpretation has only improved. This was searing
music making.
It's hardly fair to single out musicians when the whole
was so much more than the sum of its parts, but violist Lawrence Dutton
deserves special mention for his exquisite playing. Violinists Philip
Setzer and Eugene Drucker alternated taking the lead, and cellist Finckel
provided his usual effortless contributions that always seemed to carve
out the right balances.
Bartok requires these musicians to produce an amazingly
diverse range of sounds. At various times the score asks them to make
eerie noises by bowing next to the bridge (sul ponticello), by
tapping the strings with their bows (col legno), to play without
vibrato and at other times with extra schmaltz like gypsy fiddlers,
to snap strings hard while playing pizzicato and elsewhere pluck so
gently the quartet sounds like a giant lute. The finale of the sixth
quartet finds the first violin whistling a nervous tune with high harmonics
against agonizingly heartbreaking harmonies. At another point, the violist
strums like a guitar.
For all that sonic color, the quartets are built on
exquisitely detailed musical architecture. They develop, often strictly,
according to the same sort of musical building blocks that Bach and
Beethoven used. Ultimately, though, the key to the music lies in Bartok's
rhythmic and harmonic palette. Here the Emersons' technical mastery
made it easier to hear just what Bartok was up to.
In the early quartets, where tempos shift constantly,
these musicians were breathing as one. In the later pieces, Eastern
European dance rhythms toss in five-, seven- and nine-beat measures,
often scattering the rhythmic elements among three or four players in
a single measure. They never lost the thread.
Harmonically, the quartets are fascinating as they
reflect Bartok's own ambivalence about tonality and dissonance. After
all, he studied composition with 19th-century German Romantics like
Liszt. But he wanted to find a 20th-century musical language that reflected
the pungency of his Eastern European roots. As the Emersons played all
six quartets with their customary accuracy in intonation, the audience
could trace Bartok's progression from spiky dissonances that were basically
there for seasoning, to a more profound use of dissonance for emotional
effect. He gets close to atonality, but (and this is why I love Bartok
so much) never forgets that our human ears and minds want the music
to go somewhere, to experience that tension and release that comes from
tightening the harmonic screws until they come out the other side.
Bartok achieves that most effectively in the fourth,
fifth and sixth quartets, when his compositional command reaches new
levels of maturity. In the fourth, seemingly an exploration of how many
sounds a string quartet can make, a special glory of the Emersons' performance
was the way they brought such clarity to the fleet, intricate, yet muted,
second movement, which interweaves chromatic phrases so densely. In
the fifth, a moment to cherish came in the second movement when the
dissonances gave way to a quiet, almost religious chorale, which the
Emersons turned into a moment of quiet grace. Another came in the central
scherzo, where the intricate rhythms sounded so natural I expect the
entire audience might have been tapping its collective feet in nine-
and ten-beat segments. And the Emersons found the perfect deadpan humor
in the finale, with its wheezy little town-band tune.
They outdid themselves in the sixth quartet, written
in 1939, with its clear references to fascists marching into his native
Hungary and his own premonitions of death. The finale of this quartet,
with its long, aching, musical sighs, was something to treasure.
Harvey Steiman
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