LA WEEKLY
April 30 - May6 2004

LIFETIME OF A SORROWING GIANT
By Alan Rich
The Penderecki Quartet at Leo S. Bing Theatre, Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Monday April 12, 2004

PENDERECKI STRING QUARTET: BRILLIANT, BREATHING BARTOK

IN THREE CONCERTS OVER EIGHT DAYS, the excellent Penderecki String Quartet - visitors from Canada despite their chosen namesake - re-created the life span of one of the past century's giants: Bela Bartok, through his six quartets. Though he never acknowledged them as such, these remarkable works stand forth as the autobiography of his most productive years. With remarkable sureness of musical resource from the outset, they begin a tale of an eager, observant young man, surrounded by the infinite variety of the musical world circa 1908 and willing to absorb some of everything. They carry the line forward three decades to a man of deep sadness and physical pain, as shadows close in around that world. Is there a more profound leave-taking in all music than the descent into darkness by the solo cello at the end of the last of these quartets?

As with Beethoven - some of whose chamber music formed a fitting companion to Bartok's on these concerts-the quartets come closest to the composer himself, of all his works, in tracing his musical states of mind. The First does indeed move rather easily through European musical society. Ravel drops in, perhaps also Debussy; the shadow of late German Romanticism - Reger, say, or the young Schoenberg - looms not far off. The lyricism is rich and attractive, but there is little to hint at the extraordinary inventions of the later works - the stomping, jagged rhythms that intrude upon the serene landscape in the Second, the concision of power in the Third until you think the work is about to explode inside you, the nocturnal spooks that sweep across the Fourth like shadows from another planet There are outcries in these works that perhaps tell us more about Bartok himself than we ought to know; my one encounter with him - backstage, at the premiere of his Concerto for Orchestra - left me with a memory of eyes of penetrating sorrow that, 60 years later, I would not erase if I could.

There are good recordings of these quartets - the Emerson, the Takacs, the old Juilliard (which was the first and which blew everybody's mind on LP around 1950)- yet the experience of hearing them surrounded by air, even in the lousy acoustics of LACMA's Bing Theater, greatly enhanced the element of closeness to their composer that makes these works unique. Filling out the programs with late Beethoven was also exactly right: the Quartets Opp.130 and 135, and they, too, were superbly played. Opus 130, however, presented the usual problem. Beethoven's original plan was to follow the supremely beautiful Cavatina - a slow thread of endless melody best heard, as it surely was imagined, in a single breath - with a final fugue of staggering difficulty. From an emotional point of view, that would have been the proper balance. Beethoven, however, let himself be persuaded - probably by the ancestors of today's "good music" radio programmers - to let up on his audiences, and so he plugged in a much lighter dingbat of a finale that really betrays everything that has come before, and published the Great Fugue separately. At LACMA, the Penderecki played Opus 130 Lite before Bartok No. 3 and the Great Fugue alone before Bartok No. 5. If I had been running the show I'd have done the Great Fugue twice and dumped the dingbat altogether.

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