Bartók: String Quartet No. 6, Sz 114

Indisputably one of the cornerstones of the string quartet repertoire, as well as one of the masterpieces of the 20th century, Bartók’s six string quartets have been labeled ‘the greatest quartets since Beethoven’. Now, for the first time, the six quartets have been compiled onto two (rather than three) CDs with scholarly notes by Arnold Whitall. When issued as a set on LP, it won the Gramophone Award for Best Chamber Music Recording.

"The more we immersed ourselves in these works, the more beauty and richness we discovered in them and we very much hope that this appeal will even still increase in future because we definitely consider these quartets to be the greatest masterpieces of the last century in our repertoire." Belcea Quartet

The First Quartet is the most romantic in spirit and actually harbours a love story. It marks an affectionate withdrawal from a late Romantic fin-de-siècle. The Second (1915-1917) takes us some way towards the gritty, hard-hitting Bartók of the mid-late 1920s. By 1927 Bartók, a superb pianist by any standards, was enjoying a worldwide concert career, and soaking up what that world had to offer in musical terms. One probable influence was Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, an expressive masterpiece that thrives on a plethora of complexities. Bartók’s Third Quartet does likewise, a work that on one level seems to mimic a Hungarian rhapsody (the alternation of fast and slow music) while on the other takes tiny thematic cells and develops them into a teeming nest of musical activity. Bartók’s next two quartets are both cast unconventionally in five movements of a symmetrical, arch-like design. The Fourth (1928) has at its centre an evocative though austere example of Bartók’s ‘night music’ that opens with a rhapsodic cello solo leading in turn to imitated birdsong. The Fifth Quartet (1934) is built on a far larger scale. Bartok modifies the arch form by placing a scherzo at its centre, a syncopated dance movement in Bulgarian rhythm, framed by two slow movements using similar chord sequences. The air of ineffable sadness that hangs over Bartók’s last quartet (1938) reflects not only a swiftly sickening Europe but personal tragedy: his mother’s journey towards death would end in December 1939. All four movements open with the same, heart-rendering ‘mesto’ (sad) motto. Never has a quartet cycle ended quite so equivocally, or sounded a truer warning, one that even today inspires both awe and gratitude.

Béla Bartók, born in 1881, is considered by many to be the greatest Hungarian composer as well as one of the most significant musical voices of the 20th century. Self-taught and originally trained as a pianist, he combined elements of his homeland’s traditional folk music with the influences of his contemporaries to produce a highly distinctive, immediately recognisable style.

Bartok’s six string quartets, to which this 2CD compilation is dedicated, represent a milestone in the history of the genre and provide a unique insight into the way the composer’s musical language developed over four decades. It’s a fascinating stylistic journey, beginning with the First Quartet of 1907 – a work very much in the shadow of late Beethoven. Moving onto the Second (1917), written during a period of intense musical isolation, we encounter the influences of Strauss, Debussy and late Schoenberg before being subjected to the full-scale expressionism of the Third and Fourth Quartets (1927 and 1928 respectively). The Fifth, composed six years later, adopts a five-movement arch-like structure and is a strong contrast to the Sixth and final Quartet of 1938: deeply reflective and pessimistic in tone, this was to be Bartok’s last work before fleeing to the US to escape the spectre of fascist Europe.

Together with driving rhythms, sharp dissonances and even quarter tones, this cycle presents a huge challenge musically and technically to even the most accomplished quartets. The Guarneri, however, is on fine form here and delivers a first-rate performance brimming with character. A gem of a recording.

The title Hungarian Quartet was borne by two great Budapest string ensembles in the first three-quarters of the last century. The first, led by Imre Waldbauer, was formed in 1910 to play the chamber music of Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály and Leó Weiner – the trio of composers who, in addition to the slightly older Erno” Dohnányi, were to carry the flags of Hungarian music and musical education for several decades. The Hungarian Quartet toured within Europe and its members – who included the violinist János Temesváry and the cellist Jeno” Kerpely as well as several first-rate violists – were very influential. Sadly, no records were made of the ensemble. In 1935 a New Hungarian Quartet was formed by violinists Sándor Végh and Peter Szervánsky, violist Dénes Koromzay and cellist Vilmos Palotai. Owing to clashes between the violinists, Szervánsky was soon replaced by László Halmos. The young men made a start on a classical repertoire but specialised in new music by the likes of the Pole Jerzy Fitelberg, the Englishman Alan Bush the Frenchman André Jolivet and the Swiss Wladimir Vogel, as well as young Hungarian composers from Kodály’s class such as Sándor Veress. One evening in 1935 Koromzay visited his old teacher Waldbauer with his friend the composer Pál Kadosa to play bridge. ‘When I entered his living room I saw that there on the piano lay a new Bartók manuscript,’ Koromzay reminisced to the cellist and writer Claude Kennison. It was the Fifth Quartet, which Waldbauer and his colleagues had to learn so as to give the first Hungarian performance. Koromzay asked to borrow the score for a few days and next morning appeared with it at his quartet’s rehearsal. Their composer friends Kadosa and Veress offered to copy the score and the quartet members wrote out their individual parts from this copy. Koromzay then returned the original to Waldbauer without comment. Having worked furiously on the piece for three or four weeks, the New Hungarian Quartet offered to play it for Bartók. He decided to coach them in it and after ten days, offered them the first Budapest performance. This piece of skulduggery set the young ensemble on their road to success, as the Fifth Quartet became their calling card and they gave the first Vienna performance on 18 February 1936. The New Hungarians also persuaded the ISCM to accept the Bartók work for the 1936 festival in Barcelona, a further stepping stone in their international career.

Extract from the booklet note Tully Potter, 2010