Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
String Quartet No. 4 (1927)

BCMS audiences have astonished me for 26 years by their willingness to swallow various works of the past century. There have been Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, to name a few early modernists, plus the likes of Charles Wuorinen, George Crumb, Elliott Carter, Henryk Gorecki, and on to the current generation (whose compositions tend to be tamer in many respects than their gnarly predecessors). There have even been standing ovations for some of the thorny works of these composers. Only two composer's works have brought to the surface such discontent that I was personally informed of it: Charles Ives and Béla Bartók. I remember well being introduced to the metaphor "Bartók sandwich" after the performance of his Third Quartet by the Franciscan on April 15 in 1988. The premise was that you sandwich the nasty taste of that modern music between your Haydn and your Dvorak (that time it was Schubert and Beethoven) and hope the audience won't notice it going down.

The Enso Quartet is offering us an unusual twist on the normal dish. Instead of the traditional Bartók sandwich, theirs will be an "open-face" variety: the chewy, slightly nutty, complex patty of Bartók right on top; underneath, the sweet, delicate lettuce and fresh mayo Pleyel; with the hearty bread of Mendelssohn on the bottom. If you are still with me, let's talk about Bartók. Here is a marvelous confluence of modernist, folklorist (the word, "nationalist" seems inadequate to describe a scholar-composer more in love with the music of rural people than with the notion of advancing his "nation's" status), and neoclassicist.

Modernist. There's no denying that Bartók is going to offer you fragmented motives rather than full-blown themes. These pitch motives are tightly integrated, logical, and memorable (give them time). But you might hear some dissonances. Oops. He likes tritones, too. And fun glissandi as well as other special string effects such as the snap pizzicato of the string rebounding onto the fingerboard. Did I mention irregular, accented rhythms?

Folklorist. You'd have to do some score study to find the Eastern-European folk-song roots in Bartók's harmonic practice. But that's where this "modernist" dissonance originates. I'm willing to bet that the cello recitative that dominates the sensitive central movement of the Fourth Quartet is marked "parlando-rubato" in the manner of the old-style Hungarian folk song. The short-long, Magyar rhythms show up here and there, and the last movement returns to evocations of Hungarian song and dance.

Neoclassicist. I won't even bring up the Golden Section or the Fibonacci Series--you can thank me later. But you may sense the perfect arch structure to these five short movements. The first and fifth match in tempo, length, and character; so do the scherzo-like second and fourth. The slow, third movement is the pivot, with its haunting cello and violin solos against the backdrop of murmuring accompaniment. The first and last movements are the most complicated and substantive, using vestiges of sonata form complete with codas. Listening to this fourth quartet has only deepened my deep regard for the genius that was Béla Bartók. I can't think of a composer in the past century who wrote for the string quartet with as much skill, heart, and economy (and I like a lot of them). If you read this before the concert and you don't know the fourth quartet, please try to listen in advance-it was built to last.

Ignaz Joseph Pleyel (1757-1831)
String Quartet, Op. 2, no. 3 in G Minor

The string quartets of Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, in particular his Op. 2, have become a specialty of the Enso Quartet, who have recorded all six on two CDs issued by Naxos. Here are some surprising facts gleaned from Allan Badley's extensive liner notes for Enso's recordings:

After a number of years studying with Haydn, Pleyel found work meeting the musical needs of Count Erdödy in Vienna, but soon took an extended sabbatical to Italy because he felt he needed further study. He spent several more years on this quest, eventually creating a successful Italian opera (for Naples). His Italian training can be heard in his 57 (that's right, 57) string quartets that he composed mostly in a ten-year period. Here we have one from the six of Op. 2, which was published in 1784 in Vienna and dedicated to Haydn. I'm sure I don't need to point out to you Haydn's pre-eminence in the development of the string quartet. But you may have forgotten that Haydn quit composing quartets for nearly ten years after his Op. 20 in 1772. And then Mozart apparently felt obliged to do the same.

Pleyel forged ahead, under the influence of his Italian inspiration. Badley hears "Italianate cantilena" in the first violin parts. Both revealed at about the same time, Pleyel's Op. 1 and Op. 2 provoked this comment from Mozart to his father: "You will find them worth the trouble. They are very well written and most pleasing to listen to. You will also see at once who was his master. Well, it will be a lucky day for music if later on Pleyel should be able to replace Haydn."
Op. 2, no. 3 may not strike us as particularly Haydn-esque, and Allan Badley agrees, stating that Pleyel didn't so much copy Haydn as use the skills he learned to synthesize his own idiosyncratic ideas for quartet writing. I have really enjoyed getting to know the quartet in G minor. Its movement lay-out is unusual, opening with a halting, Schubert-like Adagio in some kind of truncated sonata form (almost no development). The second movement Allegro assai seems to revert to the concertante style of the early 18th century, with sequences and sprightly passage-work befitting Vivaldi, but an affect (and a sonata form) not unlike Mozart's 40th symphony. And the final Grazioso in triple meter is an elegant minuet, again featuring the first violin's singing lyricism throughout minuet and contrasting, major-mode trio. I am in full agreement with Badley: Pleyel's quartets "are a remarkable achievement . . . and it is one of the cruel quirks of fate that works of such vitality and imagination could be forgotten for so long."

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
String Quartet in A Minor, op.13 ( ("Ist es war?") (1827)

The Enso has brought us a program of firsts for our Series-something former long-time Board President Jeff Sadler always valued, as he often has reminded me. Why repeat repertoire when there is so much outstanding music for the quartet that we haven't yet heard? The Op. 13 of Mendelssohn concludes that case tonight, with thirty minutes of rich, imaginative, and skillful writing in response to the death of Beethoven in 1827. Set in A minor in homage to Beethoven's Op. 132, it plays out in four solid movements with mostly anticipated if extended classical forms.

The briefest of Adagios in A major sets the stage for a dramatic sonata-form first movement in A minor. Near its end you will hear the three-note motive (a dotted-rhythm, step down followed by a minor third up) that pervades the entire quartet and binds it to the line from a poem by Johann Gustav Droyson- "Ist es war?"-that Mendelssohn had just used for a song called "Frage (Question)," ("Is it true?"). It was true. Beethoven had suddenly died; nobody seemed to understand or particularly appreciate his late quartets, but eighteen-year-old Mendelssohn, in the full throes of Romanticism, did. He studied the scores and he learned how to mimic the master's motivic integration and development, fugal techniques, cyclic form, harmonic innovations, and interpolation of imitation operatic recitatives at significant formal junctures. But the young man's restlessness is apparent in the second movement, which cannot rest in its Adagio non lento long before it becomes Poco piu animato.

For his own part, he chances a new approach to the third movement, an "Intermezzo." This soon-to-be commander of the scherzo as both a style and a form stakes a sedate but archly sophisticated tune in the first violin, and accompanies it with pizzicato. The central section presents the Mendelssohn we expect-dancing compound meter in virtuosic string articulations and intriguing cross rhythms, until the reprise of the opening Intermezzo melody. As for the fourth movement, hang on-the opera has just begun. Near the close of its remaining nine minutes, we surely will recall that in our beginning was our end.