THE MEATY CLASSICAL SIDE OF LATE BARTOK
                            String Quartets in informative Lecture-Demo Format
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of May 15-22,  2011
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 99
            A perusal of Bartok’s last two string quartets---two of the monuments of 20th-century chamber music---gains traction when the robust performance by the Alexander Quartet is enriched by a colorful, even humorous discussion by Robert Greenberg. This unique lecture-demo collaboration has been bearing fruit in recent years on both sides of S.F. Bay, drawing a good audience even at the ungodly hour of 10 AM Saturdays.
            These local forces are legend, with the Alexander providing the acknowledged spirit and polish, and Greenberg furnishing the lighter touch. In contrasting the quartets of the two Hungarian composers Bartok and Kodály, who but Greenberg could use the metaphor of Batman (Bartok) and Robin (Kodály)?
            But Greenberg also does his musicological analysis, as well as historic context to explain, for instance, why the elite composer Bartok (1881-1945)  never got a post as composition professor on either side of the Atlantic (he didn’t want it, presumably as it might muddy or dilute his own creative thrust, and he stuck to teaching piano). Today, the multifaceted musician might just as well be the director of the folkways program at the Smithsonian Institution, as he was one of the century’s most significant collectors of folk-music material anywhere.
            Pulling away from his stylistic severity of the 1920s, Bartok created a far more accessible legacy in Quartets Nos. 5 and 6, with systematic structure paramount in his work. The Fifth for example has an arch form, like ascending a pyramid and coming down the other side, with similarities of movements 2 and 4 (which Greenberg calls “creepy…night music,”) and of the fiery 1 and 5. In the midpoint comes an arresting 4-2-3 nine-beat  Bulgarian rhythm, such as he might have heard in his folk-music-collecting through the Balkans.
            And disrupting the proceedings near the end comes a weird, out-of-pitch sequence as if on a village hurdy-gurdy which still baffles the straight-laced musicologists. My theory: He put in the jarring little episode just to baffle the theorists.  
            The Alexander players played the piece complete with panache and accuracy (except maybe that hurdy-gurdy part), bringing forth the high drama.
            Most composers I’ve met insist that their music is uninfluenced by their environment, their private life or their moods. Bartok however broke the mold. Morose over the rise of Nazism and the war clouds over Europe in 1939, his Sixth became a threnody for the good times past, with each of the movements marked mesto (“sadly”). It is one of the most depressing and emotional works ever to emanate from the composer.
            The San Francisco series, now concluded, will be followed by radio broadcasts (KALW-FM), as well as live repeats in the fall in Berkeley.
            STRING QUARTET LECTURE-DEMONSTRATIONS by the Alexander Quartet with lecturer Robert Greenberg on Bartok and Kodaly in San Francisco (and later Berkeley), through auspices of S.F. Performances. For info: (415) 392-2545, or go online.  

        ©D. Rane Danubian 2011
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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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