BARTÓK CALLING: Somehow all the folk sources got in the way of the Takács Quartet’s performance. |
Jane Ring Frank's Boston Secession, which calls itself a "professional choral ensemble," began its 12th season with a short but ambitious program: a Bach motet, Lobet den Herrn alle Heiden ("Praise the Lord, all ye nations"), his setting of Psalm 17, the shortest of all the Psalms, and the second of Brahms's two Opus 74 motets, O Heiland reiß die Himmel auf ("O Saviour, tear the heavens open"), little more than 15 minutes of music before the intermission, and then the late Russian composer Alfred Schnittke's extraordinary 1975 Requiem, only the second time I've heard it done in Boston. (Sarah Caldwell led the American premiere in 1988 as part of her landmark "Making Music Together" Russian festival, with Schnittke present.) The murky, hollow acoustics of Cambridge's First Congregational Church obliterated the clean contrapuntal lines of the Bach, a problem Ring Frank's spirited, if not particularly stylish, conducting couldn't overcome. The warmer, more richly harmonized Brahms was more successful. But the big payoff was the Schnittke.
Schnittke's mother died in 1972, and this large Requiem is a very ecumenical piece, drawing on elements of Russian Orthodox, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and even Jewish liturgy (Schnittke's father was Jewish) and Baroque and classical forms, as well as film music, pop music, and jazz (electric guitar and bass). It's scary, sometimes like a horror movie. (Could that have been Vincent Price and not Heinrich Christensen playing the shrieking organ?) Its 13 short sections omit the "Libera me" and "Lux æternas" and include a repetition, at the very end, of the opening "Requiem," which was consoling at first in its gentle chiming before turning grimmer and then, finally, resigned. The tone is most consistently one of shock and awe in confronting the mysteries of life and death, with little evidence of joy or celebration, even in the usually exuberant "Sanctus" (here the tenor — the excellent Jason McStoots — floating his voice above deeply reverberant guitar pizzicatos). The "Tuba mirum" has the startling effect of zombie-like repetitions of these opening syllables — tu-ba-mi-rum — as an ostinato undercurrent to the chant of the basses. Schnittke seems to have a horror of the otherworldly.
Ring Frank led a tight, rhythmically alert performance. The chorus here transcended the limitations of the acoustics, and the soloists and instrumentalists seemed fully committed — if anyone more than percussionist Don Holms Jr., perhaps the impressive alto Martin Near, who also played electric bass.
One complaint. The concert offered little more than an hour of music, but there was nearly as much talk. Instead of useful notes about the music, the program book was devoted to lengthy biographies, a list of donors, and ads, so Ring Frank raced through a kind of Music 101 lecture that was both tedious and hard to absorb. Isn't the best place for pre-concert lectures before the concert, and for those who want to listen to them? My hackles rise when musicians regard music as an educational rather than an artistic experience. There were also endless promotional messages about subscriptions and upcoming events, plus a chatty update on the condition of one of the chorus members (she wasn't singing that night because she was "about to pop"). If Boston Secession is the "professional" ensemble it claims to be, it might consider being as professional in its presentations as in its performances.
A weird thing happened to me during the Celebrity Series of Boston's joint concert of the Takács String Quartet and the Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikás. The idea for the program was fascinating: alternating the authentic, original, rough-edged folk music that Bûla Bartók assimilated into his compositions with his actual use of it, even in his most serious and "abstract" music. The concert began with the white-haired and mustachio'd violinist Mihály Sipos, wearing a dark vest over his long white shirt, and the other string players in a series of Transylvanian dances, both slow and fast, the fastest dance bringing the players to their feet. The edgy country harmonies couldn't have been rawer — or more seductive. Then we heard one of the Edison wax cylinders Bartók himself made on one of his field trips: a "long-flute melody," with the flutist's deep voice audible under the sound of the flute. It was even more uncanny — much more. Then Pûter Éri gave us a live sampling, with the popular Hungarian folk singer Márta Sebestyûn, before the strings returned with a "transdanubian ugrós (slow) and csárdás (fast)." After all this folk music, the Takács players finally emerged to play Bartók's profound and moving String Quartet No. 4.
But this wasn't the usual quartet rendition. In between movements, Sebestyûn and Muzsikás performed folk music loosely related to the music in the quartet. Many people in the audience said they found this all very interesting and illuminating. It may very well have been. But for some reason, I completely tuned out these "interruptions." The performance of the quartet seemed excellent, but something in me resisted the transformation of Bartók's great piece into a demonstration of his compositional practices and his relation to ethnic music. I think I might have listened harder if I had heard these pieces first and then heard the quartet played through, but — and this was not willed — I simply could not listen to this gimmicky distortion. Not what I've come to expect from the Takács.
