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The
Globe and Mail, Toronto String
quartet plays Bartok splendidly The musical language of Bela Bartok is not the one most string quartets talk at home, so to speak, but judging by Thursday's performance for Music Toronto at the Jane Mallett Theatre, it is the mother tongue to the Kitchener-based Penderecki String Quartet In fact, its performance of Bartok's String Quartet No. 3 was as lucid and natural as Beethoven is to the Alban Berg Quartet, Shostakovich to the Borodin. It wasn't perhaps as passionate, but in this particular Bartok quartet, which is economical to a degree the others are not, that extra passion wasn't missed. With phrasing both unanimous and supple, and a sound that streamed with energy (although not as sensual as it might be), this was splendid playing. The Penderecki, led in all but the Beethoven by violinist Jerzy Kaplanek, thinks rhythmically. It doesn't just render the rhythm off the page, it makes rhythm the music's backbone. It is also more concerned with the motive than with lyricism, and the more closely argued the music, the more illuminating the discussion. It was thus the intellectual clarity in Beethoven's Quartet in F, Op. 135 that stood out rather than its psychological probity. There was much less of the superlative rhetorical punctuation that so set the Bartok apart, but the Penderecki was certainly very articulate with Beethoven. Had they been a bit more limber rhythmically they would have been poetic as well. But the musical language the quartet spoke with a heavy accent was French. Indeed I've never heard an odder rendition of Claude Debussy's Quartet in G minor, Op. 10. A muscular, rhythmic Teutonic working-out of thematic possibilities, this was what Debussy might have sounded like if he had been German. The lucidity that served the quartet so well in both the Beethoven and Bartok was the last quality we wanted in Debussy, whose music celebrates the world of appearance, not its component parts. It isn't teleological, it isn't rhetorical: It's about colour, lyricism, movement. We don't want to hear how Debussy put his piece together -- in fact his luminous surrfaces depend upon a certain amount of obscurity for their shimmer. Still, there were no half measures, and the Penderecki played with the utmost conviction and competence. Unorthodox the interpretation may have been but not by default. New
for the Music Toronto series this season is a greater focus on contemporary
music, and the Penderecki -- which plays new music often and well --
made Canadian Glenn Buhr's recent Quartet No. 2 ( subtitled sixblues)
its contemporary offering for the evening. Based on Charles Mingus's
Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Buhr's unassuming, accessible work takes the listener
through a progressively slower set of variations that get ever closer
to the theme, finally given at the end like a prize. It also provided
a welcome cameo for the Penderecki's new violist, Colorado-born Christine
Vlajk, a fine addition to a fine ensemble. |
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