Back to Bartók's musical roots
(Casey A. Cass (below))
The folk ensemble Muzsikás (above) and the Takács Quartet (below) perform Sunday at Jordan Hall.
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It's a commonplace of music history that Bartók was a keen student of the folk music of his native Hungary. The songs, laments, and dances that he discovered in villages throughout the country left an audible imprint on his music.
Parsing through those borrowings sounds like an unenviable dry task. But two groups have joined up to show that it can be compelling and entertaining, too. Since 2001, the Takács Quartet and the Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikás have been playing concerts in which they interweave movements of Bartók works with the traditional music on which he drew in writing them. They'll present the program on Sunday at Jordan Hall. (Hungarian vocalist Márta Sebestyén will also be on hand.)
Speaking by phone from Chicago, Edward Dusinberre, the Takács's first violinist, offers a glimpse of how the arrangement works with Bartók's Fourth String Quartet, one of his more gnarled and elusive works. "The second movement has a very mysterious, spooky color - we're all playing with mutes and very fast," he says. Just before the quartet plays it, one of the four members of Muzsikás plays a similar dance tune on an instrument that resembles a bass recorder.
"The effect of that, when you hear the second movement, is that you suddenly realize that the strange colors that Bartók gives us were very likely inspired by particular folk sounds rather than by some sort of abstract idea," he explains. "In a sense, the effect is to humanize the piece - it sort of breaks it wide open."
Another example is the quartet's fourth movement, played completely in pizzicato and featuring an effect Bartók is widely credited with inventing: plucking a string so hard that it snaps against the fingerboard. Prior to hearing the movement, the bassist of Muzsikás plays a melody on a gardon, which Dusinberre describes as a small cello with a percussive sound.
"And the sounds that it makes are very similar to the sort of snap pizzicatos that we do on our instruments," he says. "You suddenly realize . . . it's not like he dreamed them out of nothing."
While the quartet takes up much of the concert's first half, the centerpiece of the second half is Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances, in which the two groups alternate playing the original dances and the composer's interpretations of them. Again, having the original versions in their ears transforms what the quartet members do.
"I feel like I'm trying to meet the guys in the middle," Dusinberre says. "If I have to play the same tune that I've just heard them play, I'm going to listen to their phrasing and colors; at the same time, it's not going to sound exactly the same, and that's part of the interest."
Not only do these joint concerts provide the Takács with a way to delve into Bartók's roots; Dusinberre says that their presence affects the whole concert experience, especially in the Fourth Quartet. "I'm a bit jealous of those guys on stage, because they don't have music in front of them, they're standing up. They're very fluid and vital in the way they communicate with each other. So our challenge during that program is very much to feed off their vitality and energy.
"Of course we have energy of our own," he continues, "but I think we're inspired to take more risks and play more on the edge than we might do in a usual concert. It helps us to play with more abandon and just kind of let our hair down."
Presented by
Secession season
The Boston Secession opens its season tomorrow night. The intrepid chorus and its director, Jane Ring Frank, concoct subtle and intriguing programs, often making counterintuitive links across centuries and styles. Tomorrow's concert offers two canonical motets: Bach's "Lobet den Herrn alle Heiden," and Brahms's "O Heiland, reiss die Himmel auf," one of the composer's most direct nods to the German Renaissance and Baroque traditions he had so completely absorbed. Less familiar fare comes in the form of Alfred Schnittke's highly expressive Requiem, written on texts from Schiller's "Don Carlos," which rounds out the program.
At First Church in Cambridge, Congregational; 617-499-4860, www.bostonsecession.org
