Béla BARTÓK (1881-1945)
CD1
String Quartet No 1 Op 7, Sz.40 (1908-9) [29:51]
String Quartet No 3, Sz.85 (1927) [16:48]
String Quartet No 5, Sz.102 (1934) [32:37]
CD2
String Quartet No 2 Op 17, Sz.67 (1915-17) [26:32]
String Quartet No 4, Sz.91 (1928) [23:36]
String Quartet No 6, Sz.114 (1939) [28:59]
New Budapest String Quartet
rec. Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel, Hampstead, London, November 1992. DDD.
Reviewed as a digital download from
hyperion-records.co.uk.
CDs now Archive Service only.
HYPERION DYAD CDD22003
[2-for-1: 157:03]
One of the very few upsides to Coronavirus impeding the flow new recordings
is the opportunity it affords to look back at older recordings released
before Musicweb was set up. I say all this by way of introduction to a
recording which I am sure will be familiar to many readers. Bartók’s string
quartets have always enjoyed a rather charmed life in the studio, right
from the days of the Hungarian Quartet and the earliest cycle by the
Juilliards. This recording adds to that sense of good fortune as it is a
significant part of the discography for these superb compositions.
Bartók’s quartets span virtually the entirety of his career. The First
comes right at the end of what might be called his apprentice years whereas
the last dates from 1939, shortly before his exile in the United States. As
a result, we don’t have a Bartók quartet from the period of the Concerto
for Orchestra or the third piano concerto but otherwise the cycle provides
a full picture of his development as a composer. Right from the First, we
can hear the influence of his beloved folk music as well as decided
modernist tendencies. Those tendencies erupt in the Third and Fourth
quartets and these works are rightly seen as major milestones in the history of
musical modernism.
The last two quartets are harder to categorise and a much great challenge
to the interpreter. This might seem an odd thing to say, given the
ferocious technical challenges presented by the Third and Fourth quartets
but none of the quartets who have recorded the Bartók cycle lack in any way
in the technique department. To try and illustrate what I mean I want to
focus on the opening movement of the Fifth quartet.
Most of the earlier cycles tended to emphasise this music’s progressive
tendencies. Motor rhythms were driven hard and accents were ferociously
emphasised. The prime exemplar of this approach is the Tokyo Quartet, whose
recording won a Gramophone award in 1981. I got to know these quartets from
this set and it remains a high-water mark in the discography. The Tokyo
take no prisoners in this music and their virtuosity enables them to take
things right to the limit. But compare their version of the opening of the
Fifth with that by the New Budapest Quartet and a whole other world opens up.
It might seem a point bordering on the banal but, for me, one of the
central organising principles of Bartók’s music is the very precise sound
his aural imagination conceived for virtually every note he wrote. In this
regard, he resembles composers such as Debussy or Ravel, or perhaps even
Webern, even though the style is very different. I mention this because
there is a marked tendency amongst the more modernist minded quartets to
adopt a steely unvarying tone in the more violent music. This tends to go
hand in hand with very punchy, closely miked sound. The Hyperion sound on
this release is, by contrast, extremely natural and what one might expect
for a recording of Haydn or Beethoven quartets.
Bartók was almost pathologically reluctant to repeat the same music in
exactly the same form. This in itself is a major contributor to the
structure of his music, which is in a state of constant evolution. A huge
part of that ongoing process of variation lies in the way he very precisely
changes the timbre of each repetition.
The first movement of the Fifth quartet opens with an almost Haydnesque
fanfare that I hesitate to call a first subject but whose repetitions serve
as an organising feature for the movement. None of the numerous repeats of
this fanfare-like figure is the same. Bartók displays a genius for
“orchestrating” these repeats that does take me back to Haydn. Why this
matters is that is a whole extra dimension is added to Bartók’s sound
world. Anyone who knows Bartók will have admired the extreme delicacy of
his ‘night music’ yet that astonishing sensitivity in both hearing and
imagination (I believe the two are connected – if you can hear more, you
can imagine more) also extends into the faster, more abrasive music. More
importantly still, the quartets that understand this also get right under
the surface of the last two quartets. The Takács in their 1997 recording
for Decca do so, and so do the New Budapest Quartet on this recording.
Both quartets seem to approach this music from the folk music side. They
are certainly less driven than any of the other recordings to which I have
listened. The New Budapest Quartet take their time even more than the
Takács. In the Third and Fourth Quartets my 15-year-old self, fresh from
the Tokyo set, would have complained that it lacked the necessary ferocity.
Time and again the New Budapest Quartet demonstrate that ferocity is not
the only way of playing this music. Their Fourth is genuine chamber music
with all the intimacy that implies. The wonderfully exciting Tokyo account
is very much of the concert hall. Contrast the vehemence of the Tokyo
Quartet in the pizzicato scherzo of the fourth movement with the
kaleidoscopic variety of colours the New Budapest Quartet find through
pushing the music a little less hard.
Where the Takács bring out the colours and rhythms of Hungarian folk music,
the New Budapest Quartet are extremely good at tuning in to the darkness
and strangeness of the folk tradition. As Carl Jung was writing at the time
these quartets were composed, the folk traditions of the world give us a
window onto the collective unconscious of humanity. This is the world
Mahler found in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, for example. As with his
arrangements of actual folk music, that astonishing ear of Bartok’s was
able to pick out, time and again, the harmony or the timbre needed to draw
us deeper into this uncanny world, at once familiar and unnerving.
Performers need to match Bartok’s sensitivity in their own responses.
As I mentioned at the start of this review, the Bartók string quartets have
always been fortunate in the studio, so there are many very fine versions
from which to choose. As will have become increasingly obvious, I believe
that the approach to the final two quartets is what separates the very good
from the exceptional. Over the last year or so I have enjoyed excellent
accounts by the Diotima and the Jerusalem quartets particularly in Nos 1-4
but where all of them come up somewhat lacking is in the Fifth and the
Sixth.
What I have referred to as the modernist approach delivers less with these
two much more elusive works. No amount of hammering away at the fanfare
figure in the first movement of the Fifth, discussed already, however
energetically done, will cause it to deliver up its secrets. If anything,
the Sixth is even more mysterious in this regard. All the fingerprints of
Bartók’s mature style are there but isn’t it just a low voltage retread of
past glories? Not in the hands of the New Budapest Quartet it isn’t. I
think their version of the Sixth is the finest thing on this set. It is
equal parts disturbing and moving. I don’t think I have ever heard an
account which so successfully fuses the recurrent Mesto (sad) section to
the rest of the work in such an organic, almost inevitable way. The final
bars bring the whole cycle to a close with the utmost in quiet finality.
This set is an outrageous bargain as a download – the Archive
Service CDs are more expensive – and if you don’t already own it, I can only
urge you to give it a go. I can’t recall why I overlooked this splendid
recording when it first came out but I do know that it has tended to be
overshadowed by the Takács in my mind. It is more than an equal to that
recording which has been my first choice in these endlessly rewarding pieces for some time.
In the case of the Sixth, the New Budapest Quartet are in a league of their
own.
David McDade
