Wigmore Hall
String Quartet no.1
String Quartet no.3
String Quartet no.5
Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bresler (violins)
Ori Kam (viola)
Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)
This was the first of two
concerts in which the Jerusalem Quartet would perform Bartók’s six string
quartets. If there were slight frustration in my only being able to hear the
first, it surely augured well for the second, which I look forward to hearing
about, if not, alas, to hearing.
The particular, sometimes
competing demands of early Bartók can prove difficult to bring off: no such
problem here, in as fine a performance of the First Quartet (1908-9) as I can
recall hearing. The opening chromaticism of the violin-duo opening signalled a
strongly Schoenbergian presence: one, I think, that endured throughout the
quartet and beyond it. For it was not only in the score, though there it
certainly was; it was played as such, too, intense yet variegated, in an
unmistakeably Austro-Hungarian performance. The Jerusalem Quartet players
showed keen ears – and a keen collective ear – for form and structure,
expressed without didacticism, born from and living through the notes and their
connections. Contrapuntal procedures were invested with dynamism both intellectual
and emotional. And how each instrument came into its own through that! New
possibilities were signalled and taken in the second movement, which struck a
fine balance at its opening between emergence from what had gone before
contrast therewith. The finale brought to life a rhetorical disjuncture that
had something of Beethoven to it: not in the banal sense of sounding ‘like’
Beethoven’s music, but in spirit, in reinvention. Bartók’s music already seemed
to presage the world of Bluebeard,
its dramatic flight a product of fierce conviction in performance.
If that final movement, even in
the strongest performance such as this, seems nonetheless to go on a little, no
one could seriously make such a claim concerning the Third Quartet (1927). Tonality
here seemed less on the verge of suspension than beside the point – until it
was otherwise. It was certainly motivic working above all that afforded the
dynamism in this performance of the opening ‘Prima partie’: dialectical motivic
working, that is, in the line of Bach and Beethoven. The music’s emotional
intensity somehow seemed both greater and more sparing: surely testament to
Bartók’s mastery of form and genre by this stage in his career. The slow-fast ‘Hungarian’
relationship of the first two movements likewise seemed brought to perfection:
internalised and thus the more meaningfully expressed. The ‘Recapitulazione
della prima parte’ sounded, rightly, not so much as reconciliation but as arbiter
and moulder of memory. It was as new as it was old, paving the way for an
explosive coda section, as richly developmental within its concise frame as the
score from which this magnificent performance sprang.
The Fifth Quartet (1934) had
the second half to itself. That uncompromising intensity, intellect and emotion
as one, characteristic of both works so far persisted, reinvented itself here
too in its first movement and beyond. The players afforded the first subject –
I think we can safely call it that – great detail without the slightest suspicion
of fussiness, strokes broad, fine, even both, or so it seemed. A pale delirium,
increasingly less pale, characterised the response: just as involving, quietly
and less quietly generative. Disjuncture and coherence, melodic line and
complexity played out in a fashion that perhaps inevitably brought late
Beethoven to mind. It made me long to hear the Jerusalem Quartet in Ligeti too.
How strange the final poco allargando phrase
sounded, yet also how right. I loved the sense imparted in the following ‘Adagio
molto’ of a somewhat disoriented and disorienting hymn. (Again, Beethoven’s
precedent seemed fruitfully, never oppressively, immanent.) It is ‘night music’,
of course, but far more than that. So too is the fourth movement, whose harmony
likewise remained fundamental in a not un-Classical way, very much providing a
sense of the celebrated Bartókian arch. In between, the scherzo had held
harmony, melody, and yes, of course metre in fruitful, riveting dialogue: Haydn
for the 1930s. It was Beethoven’s ghost that again lightly haunted the finale, titanic
effort to wield material together amply rewarded. But if there were unanimity
of purpose, there was equally fierce independence of instrumental voice within
that purpose and progress. For work, ensemble, and performance alike, this was emphatically
a string quartet.
