Escher Quartet's Bartok cycle,Igor Levit at Carnegie

[Rach3]

New Yorker today, Alex Ross:

On March 28, 1949, at Times Hall, in midtown Manhattan, an unexpectedly large crowd materialized to hear the Juilliard Quartet play the second part of a two-concert survey of the six string quartets of Béla Bartók. According to the Times, so many seats were crammed onstage that the quartet “had just enough elbow room, and no more, for its performance.” Mounted police monitored a crush of ticket seekers outside. The musical intelligentsia had turned out en masse. In attendance was the serialist composer Milton Babbitt, who, in a commentary on the event, hailed Bartók’s cycle as a “single, self-contained creative act.” Also present was Dmitri Shostakovich, who had come to New York at Stalin’s behest, in order to mouth propaganda at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace. Shostakovich, too, listened alertly; he had embarked on his own monumental quartet project. All told, the concert attested to Bartók’s ascension, four years after his death, to the classical pantheon. Formerly, composers of quartets had reckoned with the gigantic shadow of Beethoven. Now they also had to contend with a leaner, feistier ghost.

Bartók, like Igor Stravinsky and Alban Berg, had the fortune to be a popular modernist, appealing to a broad audience while keeping his place in the twentieth-century vanguard. His quartets exhibit an extraordinary degree of motivic coherence, their structures often extrapolated from a core motto of five or six notes. The string writing is at once violently inventive and acutely expressive, incorporating guttural distortions of pitch, cawing glissandos, clattering bowing effects, and the “Bartók pizzicato,” in which a string is plucked so hard that it snaps against the fingerboard. The middle quartets, created amid the avant-garde furor of the nineteen-twenties, border on raw noise. Yet the composer’s passionate devotion to the folk traditions of his native Hungary and of neighboring countries meant that he could never entirely abandon the home ground of tonality. The result was a music as uncannily familiar as it was radically new.

No equine units were needed outside Alice Tully Hall the other day when the Escher Quartet—Adam Barnett-Hart, Brendan Speltz, Pierre Lapointe, and Brook Speltz—played the Bartók quartets in a single, three-and-a-half-hour concert, under the aegis of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Still, it felt like a significant occasion. The Eschers, who have been playing together since 2005, when they met at the Manhattan School of Music, were nodding to another august group, the Emerson Quartet, which disbanded last fall after a remarkable forty-seven-year run. No one seems to have attempted a Bartók-quartet marathon until the Emersons undertook one, at Tully, in 1981; they repeated the feat seven times in the course of the following two decades. The Eschers were mentored by the Emersons and often emulate their elders. The emphasis is on technical perfection, formal cogency, and unity of interpretive approach. Underscoring the continuity is the fact that David Finckel, the Emersons’ longtime cellist, is a co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society.

In the first two quartets—the concert proceeded chronologically, with two intermissions—the Eschers were restrained in their approach, missing opportunities to dramatize the folkish component of Bartók’s writing. I couldn’t shake the memory of a blistering all-Bartók program that the Takács Quartet offered in December at the Clark Library, in Los Angeles. Consider the middle movement of the Second Quartet. At the Clark, Edward Dusinberre, the Takácses’ longtime first violinist, dug into the main tune with village-fiddler zest while Harumi Rhodes, the second violinist, sawed away savagely at octave D’s, and Richard O’Neill, the violist, struck pizzicatos that went off like firecrackers. The Eschers lacked raucous energy in this passage and in several comparable ones.

I had the sense, though, that the Eschers were husbanding their resources. (The Takács concert was limited to the even-numbered quartets.) Indeed, in the Third Quartet things heated up handsomely: the coda built to a lusty frenzy, even as the musicians maintained near-miraculous control of pitch and coördination of rhythm. The stage was set for the Fourth, whose five movements add up to a summa of Bartók’s art, by turns tenaciously labored, sinuously swirling, nocturnally eerie, pizzicato-punchy, and flat-out wild. I became increasingly appreciative of this quartet’s unerring balance of voices: in the time-stopping middle movement, each player is given an extended solo, like storytellers taking turns around a campfire, and here the eloquence was unbroken.

In the Fifth and Sixth Quartets, the Eschers threw caution aside. This was crucial in summoning the eclectic, mercurial personality of Bartók’s farewell essays in the medium. The Burletta of the Sixth is an exercise in inebriated tomfoolery, with intimations of café jazz; the Adagio molto of the Fifth, by contrast, is a rapt midnight colloquy, akin to Beethoven’s most visionary slow movements. The Eschers tied together this kaleidoscopic music with spirited authority. In all, they seem poised to carry forward the standard of flexible mastery that the Emersons exemplified for decades; their discography shows a sensitive command of repertory ranging from Mendelssohn and Dvořák to Zemlinsky and Ives. If they still have something to learn from the Takácses’ refined rowdiness, the same can be said of every quartet working.

Three days before the Eschers occupied Tully, a no less striking marathon took place at Carnegie Hall. The thirty-seven-year-old German pianist Igor Levit has pulled off many memorable exploits in his career—performances of Beethoven’s final sonatas and of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues in single sittings; a rendition of the Goldberg Variations in the midst of a Marina Abramović installation; a twenty-hour-long immersion in Satie’s endlessly repeating “Vexations.” But the program he brought to Carnegie may have been his most audacious to date. It consisted of Hindemith’s Suite “1922”; the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, transcribed for piano by Ronald Stevenson; and Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, transcribed for piano by Liszt.

To devote most of a piano recital to music written for orchestra appears self-defeating. No matter how brilliant the playing, the audience is all too likely to be noticing what’s absent: the variety of instrumental timbres, the enveloping crunch of the tutti. Yet the piano possesses its own occult powers, and both transcribers cannily deploy its resources. In the climax of the Mahler, crashing tremolando chords over a long pedal approximate the shattered cathedral majesty of the original. During the central crisis of Beethoven’s Funeral March, hammering octaves in the bass register, again with the pedal held down, unleash a dissonant boom that is in some ways more unnerving than the corresponding passage in orchestral form.

Extreme virtuosity is required to play the “Eroica” transcription, and Levit supplied it. The rapid-fire sotto-voce chords that launch the Scherzo went off with purring finesse; the coda of the first movement became an exuberant one-man stampede. Just as impressive was Levit’s ability to sustain tension across spare textures, as at the desolate end of the Funeral March. Acoustical mirages beguiled the ears: in the trio of the Scherzo, brassy E-flat-major triads evoked a trio of hunting horns. Most of all, Levit demonstrated a comprehensive, from-the-gut understanding of a work that even the most gifted conductors struggle to grasp whole. You felt that you were listening not to a symphony in reduced form but to the greatest of all Beethoven sonatas. Much of this illusion resulted from Liszt’s sorcery in translating the score for the piano; the rest was Levit’s doing.

A hushed E-flat-major encore, in the form of Brahms’s Intermezzo Opus 117, No. 1, brought the recital into the zone of the transcendent. “My God,” a colleague texted afterward. If you missed it, Levit is coming around next season with the Beethoven Seventh. ♦

Published in the print edition of the April 1, 2024, issue, with the headline “Twin Feats.”


Alex Ross has been the magazine’s music critic since 1996. His latest book is “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.”

[Ricordanza]

If you missed it, Levit is coming around next season with the Beethoven Seventh.

To be more precise, Sunday afternoon, January 12, 2025. Already on my calendar.