Colorado Quartet in Bartok Marathon

   The Cincinnati Chamber Music Society is into marathons.
   To open their diamond jubilee (75th anniversary) season last fall, the CCMS presented violinist Christian Tetzlaff in the complete sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin.
   In April, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio will perform the complete Beethoven piano trios over a three day period.
   Tuesday and Wednesday, the renowned Colorado Quartet will perform the complete string quartets by Bela Bartok. Concerts are 7:30 p.m. in Corbett Auditorium at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
   It will be the first back-to-back traversal of Bartok’s collective opus in Cincinnati in recent memory (perhaps ever). The Tokyo String Quartet performed the six quartets at CCM in 1993 in two concerts four months apart.
   The Colorado foursome – violinists Julie Rosenfeld and Deborah Redding, violist Marka Gustavsson and cellist Diane Chaplin - are quartet-in-residence at Bard College in New York State. With complete cycles of Beethoven and Bartok on their resume - including the first ever Bartok cycle in Philadelphia in 1995 and an upcoming recording of the complete Beethoven quartets for Parnassus – they take such things in stride.
   That doesn’t mean it’s easy, said Redding, who, incidentally, is also a marathon runner.
   "Playing an all-Bartok concert is very much like running a marathon," with "rest, maybe a little massage, a chiropractor, a hot bath" during the day.
   Redding is much more concerned about people’s attitudes toward the Bartok quartets.  
"We find that audiences think they have trouble with Bartok so we encourage them to just listen and let us give them some insight. If we can talk even for two minutes about what a piece is about, we find that people always find something they can grasp, something that is appealing and rewarding."
   Bartok’s quartets are viewed as comparable to Beethoven’s, said Redding, who with Rosenfeld, is one of the ensemble’s founding members. (The quartet, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2003, began as graduate quartet-in-residence at the University of Colorado in Boulder, then moved to the Juilliard School in New York.)
   "We think of them very much like we think of the quartets of Beethoven. Not only can you trace Bartok’s entire compositional career, but you can see what was going on in the rest of music in Europe and America at the same time. They provide a microcosm of art music from 1907 to 1939."
   To enhance audience appreciation, especially for those who may attend only one of the two concerts, the group is performing them in a kind of "sampler" presentation instead of chronologically.
   Tuesday’s program will comprise Nos. 1, 6 and 4. Nos. 2, 3 and 5 will be heard Wednesday.
   "Each of the concerts will have one of the early quartets, one of the last two and one of the middle, most difficult, abstract quartets," Redding explained.
   "The first quartet is pseudo late-romantic, a combination of late German romanticism and French impressionism, with hints of Hungarian nationalism."
   "In the second quartet (1915-17), you see the absorption of ethnic influences in his music."
   Bartok, along with his countryman Zoltan Kodaly, conducted extensive researches of Hungarian folk music. Bartok went beyond Kodaly, however, going as far as North Africa and Turkey.
   "He felt that the music and culture of native peoples was disappearing," said Redding. "As a humanist and a thinking person, he felt that the salvation of the world lay in finding the brotherhood of man, which he found in folk music." Integrating his folk music research into his works was "the overriding passion of his life," she said.
   "In the third and fourth quartets (1927-28), you hear the abstract expressionism that was going on in western European music," including Stravinsky, American composer Henry Cowell (tone clusters) and Schoenberg (12-tone techniques).
   "With his last two quartets (1934, 1939), Bartok kind of relaxed that expressionist tendency," she said. "His fifth and sixth quartets become a bit more neo-romantic, more emotional, more subjective.
   "The sixth, my personal favorite, is the last piece he wrote before being forced to leave Hungary because of the Second World War. Each movement starts with a theme called ‘Mesto,’ which means sad." The second and third movements are "very biting and sardonic" and the last "bittersweet and absolutely heartbreaking."
   Bartok was so outspoken against fascism – he requested that his music not be performed where it could be heard in Germany or Italy - that "he had to leave Hungary," she said. "He came to New York and did not do well. He was ill (he died of leukemia in 1945) and did not make a lot of money. His music was a little bit too far ahead for most Americans."
   The Colorado Quartet performs the complete quartets of Bartok at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday in Corbett Auditorium at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Tickets are $30, $10 for students, 18 and under free. Special packages with the Kingsgate Marriott and Lenhardt’s Hungarian Restaurant. Call (513) 522-2652 or visit www.cincychamber.org.
(first published in The Cincinnati Post Jan. 10, 2005)