concert review: Takács Quartet
Jan. 27th, 2014 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacA few weeks ago, my editor alerted (warned, cautioned, even admonished) me that he'd be expecting me to cover the Takács Quartet's Bartók cycle. Holy bleep, what an assignment. Toughest I've had since being sent to hear the Concord Sonata. (And that was why I was looking for somebody who really likes Bartók.)
This called for intensive pre-concert study, to get a handle on these works I'd never entirely digested. I'd heard them all at one time or another, but the only one I'd ever enjoyed hearing was the Fourth, and I don't claim to understand any of them.
Unfortunately, a satisfactory study of such difficult works would take at least 10 or 12 hours, and exigencies, alluded to earlier in this blog, meant that there was no time. None. I read a little technical musicology about them, I perused and marked up the scores, but that was about it. I didn't even make a full listen to recordings, because I couldn't do it early enough to prevent the concert from becoming fatigue instead of enlightenment.
As a result, my review reads to me an amateur's view, Thog goes to a string quartet concert. I sat there through weird and bewildering passage after passage, just trying to find some sort of handle to grab on to. In the end I had to write about the knobs and not the train. It just added to the intensity of an already high-pressure weekend.
This called for intensive pre-concert study, to get a handle on these works I'd never entirely digested. I'd heard them all at one time or another, but the only one I'd ever enjoyed hearing was the Fourth, and I don't claim to understand any of them.
Unfortunately, a satisfactory study of such difficult works would take at least 10 or 12 hours, and exigencies, alluded to earlier in this blog, meant that there was no time. None. I read a little technical musicology about them, I perused and marked up the scores, but that was about it. I didn't even make a full listen to recordings, because I couldn't do it early enough to prevent the concert from becoming fatigue instead of enlightenment.
As a result, my review reads to me an amateur's view, Thog goes to a string quartet concert. I sat there through weird and bewildering passage after passage, just trying to find some sort of handle to grab on to. In the end I had to write about the knobs and not the train. It just added to the intensity of an already high-pressure weekend.
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no subject
Date: 2014-01-29 03:52 pm (UTC)I like the Fourth best for two reasons: it seems to have the highest concentration of interesting and delightful effects; and the most convincing and winning performance I've ever heard of a Bartok quartet was of the Fourth by the TinAlley Quartet a few years ago. It pleased me more than their more conventional repertoire.
Relative accessibility of the six quartets doesn't enter into it. That was the point of the 4th paragraph of my review. If you analogize "difficulty" to situating on the high plains, I don't see the Sixth, for instance, as at a lower elevation or down in a river valley. It's at the same elevation as the others, just with a hole in the ground.
I saw that the Takacs were performing this in NYC, but I didn't want to read the reviews before finishing my own, and I didn't have time to look them up to compare reactions afterwards before turning mine in, though I sometimes do that to help clarify my own thoughts.