Bartok - String Quartet nr. 4

I dived back into Bartok's universe with his Fourth Quartet. After all the easily digestible stuff: what a meaty piece of music this is! It's Bartok at his most uncompromisingly modernist. But just as I love the jagged Third Quartet I find this an unbelievable rich musical adventure.

This is likely the Bartok I love most. The lush and opulent romanticism of his early work and the poised neo-classicism of his final years is attractive enough. But the work of the mid-to-late 1920s - (the Sonata, Out of Doors, First and Second Piano Concertos, Third and Fourth Quartets, and I'd also like to include the slightly earlier Dance Suite) stands apart in its volcanic energy, textural sophistication, architectural originality and emotional complexity.

The Fourth Quartet packs quite a punch in its 21 minutes. Striking is, of course, the rigorously symmetrical groundplan, radiating out from another of Bartok's eerie night musics. The central Non troppo lento strongly reminds us of the ghostly slow movement in Out of Doors, which in itself is a locus classicus of musical modernism. There is nothing straightforward in this quartet but the outer movements come across as particularly challenging. There is no way I can start to make sense of Eliott Antokoletz's detailed discussion of the Fourth Quartet in the Bartok Companion (he wrote his PhD thesis on this very work back in 1975) but what I seem to understand is that in this composition Bartok has been able to creatively merge elements of conventional tonality and meta-tonality, of chromaticism and diatonicism, of folk music and art music, of organic development and classical balanced forms. It's a significant departure from the thematic-motivic construction of traditional sonata form,but not as disruptive as the wholesale move to serialism. It's a creative and idiosyncratic fusion that only Bartok has been able to achieve.

I have been listening to two versions of the Fourth Quartet: first the Kellers which confirmed the impression I had from listening to the Third Quartet, namely a rewarding reading but at times strangely vaccilating or hesitant, and captured in a lacklustre recording. The Belcea Quartet offers tremendous excitement. Again, as in the Third, it's an stupefyingly virtuosic and kinetic rendering, with a palpable sense of playing at the knife's edge. But unlike the Emersons, for example, I find the result never harsh or overblown and always musical (I don't have the recording with the Zehetmair on ECM but judging from what I hear on Youtube it sounds like a brutal performance, and over the top). And the Belcea's EMI recording is truly first class. I'd like to listen to a few other versions - Vegh II and Juiliard II - before I move on.