Music Reviews : Bartok Quartet Plays Bartok Fourth at Gindi

Los Angeles may be the city of the standing ovation. But for chamber music? It happened on Saturday at Gindi Auditorium; the sort of bolting-out-of-the-seat reaction that results from barely controllable emotion.

The unlikely objects of this adulation were the members of the veteran Bartok Quartet of Budapest--hardly newcomers to the local scene--presented on this occasion by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with assistance from that rarity of rarities, an enlightened, music-loving politician: Supervisor Edmund D. Edelman.

The equally unlikely music that fired the audience was the gnarled Fourth Quartet of the performers’ namesake, Bela Bartok, which can seem nothing more than screech-and-clatter nonsense in insensitive hands.

What this particular Bartok Fourth had, on the most superficial level, was speed and accuracy. The four players--violinists Peter Komlos and Geza Hargitai, violist Geza Nemeth, cellist Laszlo Mezo--must have clipped a couple of minutes off any previous record for this score, with, amazingly, details emerging with heightened clarity. Then, too, there was the matter of sonority: splendidly strong and focused, helped no doubt by Gindi’s enriching acoustics.

But what ultimately made Saturday at the Gindi memorable was a confluence of dramatic fervor and splendor of tone, Bartok being helped no more by an ugly sound than is Brahms. Perhaps it’s unfair to single out one player here in this connection, but the composer himself did by allowing the cellist a star turn in the spectral third movement, where cellist Mezo produced a banshee wail of heartbreaking sadness and beauty.

Prior to the Bartok Fourth there had been excitement of a less heady but no less welcome sort: a witty, stompingly rhythmical Haydn “Emperor” Quartet, whose minuet in this delectable interpretation clearly foreshadowed the dancing bumpkins of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony.

If, following intermission, Schubert’s D-minor Quartet (“Death and the Maiden”)--heard a few times too often here each season--proved anticlimactic, it was not for lack of dedication or skill on the part of the evening’s heroes.