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.
The comparative approach worked better in the second half of the concert. There was a brief selection from Bartók's 44 vigorous and unusual Violin Duos in which exciting, imaginative playing of the Bartók from Sipos and Takács second violinist Károly Schranz alternated with folk pieces played by the two Muzsikás fiddlers and Dániel Hamar on the gardon (a handheld, cello-like stringed instrument that he slapped, tapped, and struck). There was also a string-quartet transcription of Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances, where he most directly used the folk tunes Muzsikás played. Sebestyûn, with her appealing ululations and nasal twang, sang a song in which she imitated one of Bartók's favorite folk instruments, a bagpipe. Then the Takács played their former violist Roger Tapping's transcription for strings of a piano piece called "Bagpipes."
Sebestyûn's best number was a melancholy folk song, with long flute, about a shepherd who prays his murderers will stand his flute up as his gravestone so the wind can play it after his death. The encore was, for once, an actual repeat: the most popular of the Romanian Dances, with all eight players at their most exuberant.
