The Juilliard String Quartet has practically owned the string quartets of Bela Bartok since its founding in 1946. Indeed, these seminal masterpieces of 20th Century chamber music have remained at the core of its vast repertory despite the many personnel changes the ensemble has undergone over the decades. Its mastery of Bartok’s endlessly challenging scores remains one of the great givens.
So it came as no surprise that the New York-based quartet’s performance of three Bartok quartets Tuesday night in Ravinia’s Martin Theatre should give off so palpable a sense of pride in ownership.
The concert marked the beginning of a two-evening cycle of all six Bartok quartets by the Juilliard. The house should have been packed but looked to be only about three-quarters full. Which was too bad, because chamber music playing of such depth, commitment and knife-edge virtuosity doesn’t come along that often.
Besides the stiff demands this repertory makes on players’ technique and concentration, Bartok’s sometimes harsh sonorities can take their toll on the strings of their instruments.
Near the end of the Juilliard’s ferocious account of the third Bartok quartet, cellist Joel Krosnick broke a string and had to go offstage to replace it. When he returned, he and his colleagues agreed to perform the entire one-movement work again. They threw themselves into it with the controlled abandon of practiced daredevils, as if tempting fate to strike a second time. It didn’t.
They began where Bartok did, with the First Quartet (1910). You can hear the composer shifting stylistic gears as the music progresses. The sighing chromaticism of the opening breathes the air of turn-of-the-century Vienna, next door to the composer’s Budapest. Later in the score, the players toss around fragments of Hungarian folk song, creating spiky textures typical of Bartok’s mature style.
Here the Juilliard’s minutely gauged dynamics, phrasings and rhythmic gestures sprang from a single interpretive intelligence. Even more remarkable was the quasi-orchestral depth of sonority provided by violist Samuel Rhodes and Krosnick below the finely poised interplay of violinists Joel Smirnoff and Ronald Copes.
The mood-swings of Quartet No. 3 (1927) range from slashing dissonant chords to spectral muted moans to eerie glissando slitherings to bracing stylizations of Hungarian folk melody. Music so fiercely concentrated demands similar concentration from performers, and the Juilliard supplied it generously.
The five-movement Quartet No. 5 (1934) is even more concise, filled with detached phrases to which Smirnoff and friends brought an apt astringency of tone and intensity of attack. The “night music” of the Andante movement, filled with evocative chirpings and buzzings, made a good foil to the bracing, stamping dance rhythms of the finale.
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jvonrhein@tribune.com
