Hailed for their passionate and spellbinding performances, the Brentano String Quartet has enthralled audiences worldwide since 1992. With a luxurious warm sound and an innate ability to find the essence of every musical phrase, the quartet has garnered critical acclaim across five continents. "Passionate, uninhibited and spellbinding," raves the London Independent.

The Musical World of Bartok’s Fifth Quartet

The Fifth Quartet of Bela Bartok, a compelling and magnificent work, has a number of special characteristic preoccupations which give it a distinct and riveting personality. This program serves as a focus on that great work by creating a context for several of those preoccupations through the music of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Purcell, Berio, and Bartok himself. These short (2-5 min) selections, performed as the concert’s first half, will help illustrate music canons (“Chases and Reflections”), ethnic idioms (“Hungarian and Bulgarian Rhythms”), and obsession (“Fixation on a Single Note”). Following this immersive investigation (and intermission for reflection!), Bartok’s Quartet No.5 stands poised to be heard in a new space, with clarity and immediacy.

​Program

Short works by Bartók, Bach, Purcell, Haydn, Berio and Beethoven illustrating various characteristics embedded in the single work on the program’s second half: Béla Bartók's String Quartet No. 5

A note from Owen Dalby, co-Artistic Director

Bartók's Fifth String Quartet is one of those pieces whose rewards are directly proportional to the attention you give it.

Listen multiple times to this piece ahead of time, so that when you experience it live, your ears, your mind and your musical heart are as open as they possibly can be.

In no particular order here are a few recordings to get you started. There are SO many to choose from, and I leave out some real benchmarks: Emerson, Tokyo, Hungarian, Vegh, Alban Berg, Belcea, Keller…

Juilliard Quartet (1963)

The venerable Juilliard Quartet, who performed for us at Noe Music last season, recorded the cycle of Bartok quartets three times—in 1949, 1963, and 1981. They were the first American quartet to perform and record all six Bartoks, and their influence on quartet playing in America can’t be overstated. Changes in personnel were common in this group’s history, but the founding first violinist Robert Mann was a driving force in all three recordings. The 1963 version is my favorite of the three; it’s fresh, vigorous, beautifully recorded with Bobby Mann at the height of his powers.

Takacs Quartet (with score)

The Takacs, another tremendous ensemble that is still among the top quartets performing today (albeit with personnel changes since this recording was made), could claim to have a direct line to an “authentically” Hungarian performance tradition via the mentorship of Zoltan Szekely and Sandor Vegh, who new Bartok extremely well, and whose own string quartets recorded the cycle in an earlier generation. It’s a wonderful recording, although slightly too reverberant and distantly mic’d for my taste—but the YouTube video has the invaluable resource of the score, displayed page by page as the music plays. It’s a wonderful way to watch as well as listen for those who enjoy following a score.

Kolisch Quartet (1941)

This legendary group actually gave the premiere of the work at the Library of Congress in 1935, and this recording was made a mere six years later. They were famous for, among other things, performing even the most difficult works entirely from memory. This recording thus represents an early “take” on the work—to my ear, it’s slick and smooth, even charming! I’d call this representative of a central European sound from pre-WWII. Bartok himself must have loved the way these guys played, and who are we to argue! The Kolisch quartet’s violist, Eugene Lehner, was a beloved mentor to generations of students at the New England Conservatory and elsewhere in North America, and was a huge influence on my colleagues in the St Lawrence Quartet.

A discussion of other favored recordings:

https://www.talkclassical.com/threads/bartok-string-quartet-5-sq-review.82192/

A blog post by the wonderful Arnold Steinhardt of the Guarneri Quartet:

https://keyofstrawberry.com/the-bartok-project/

An analytically dense but brief program note:

String Quartet No. 5, Sz. 102, BB 110 The movements of the Quartet No. 5, like those comprising the Fourth Quartet, the Second Piano Concerto, and the Concerto for Orchestra, are arranged according to a broad, symmetrical plan, a so-called “arch form,” in which the central movement is flanked, mirror-fashion, by parallel balancing movements: fast– slow–scherzo–slow–fast. The integrity of this structure is enhanced by having a theme from the first movement reappear in the finale, and by making the fourth movement a free variation of the second. Symmetrical procedures extend as well to the internal working-out of individual movements. The opening sonata-form movement is based on three themes: a motive of hammered repeated notes; a brusque rhythmic figure upon which are superimposed short, winding melodic phrases; and a smoothly flowing strain in triplet rhythms. Following the development section, the three motives are recapitulated in reverse order and in inversion, and the movement is capped by a vigorous coda: A–B–C–development–C–B–A– coda. The Adagio, a fine example of the rustling “night music” that Bartók favored for many of his slow movements, follows a similar plan, though with different proportions and expressive effect: A (trills and two-note atoms)– B (chorale)–C (pizzicato glissandos, tremolos, and evanescent scale fragments)–B (abbreviated)–A (abbreviated). The conventional form of the Scherzo and Trio is already symmetrical (A–B–A), and Bartók drew the symmetry into the smallest levels of the movement by echoing the upward-arching, one-measure theme with its descending inversion. The central Trio is distinguished by its quicker tempo, incessant ribbon of violin notes, and rustic folk dance in limping rhythms. The Andante posits three thematic ideas that transform motives from the Adagio (repeated pizzicato; bouncing bows; murmured scales and canonic treatment of the Adagio’s third theme) and their truncated returns to round out the movement. At the center stands a new snapping theme that is developed and woven with the movement’s other ideas. The finale is a free rondo with sonata elements based on a fiery dance melody constructed from small, twisting intervals. Just as the movement reaches its climax (in a passage whose ferocious rhythms recall Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), the music stops for a grotesque, barrel-organ transformation of the first episode’s theme before a blazing epilogue closes the quartet.

-Richard E Rodda (from Cal Performances’ program notes for a complete Bartok cycle in 2019 by the Takacs Quartet)