Intense Takacs Quartet finally loosens up enough

The Takacs Quartet won a Grammy two months ago for its gripping recording of Beethoven’s middle string quartets. The intense Hungarian ensemble brings to Beethoven the ferocious vehemence that makes its Bartok so celebrated. One listens glued to one’s chair, sometimes wishing for just a bit more air. But not too hard. When musicians as committed as this try to loosen up, they don’t always have a lot of originality.

Last year, Takacs toured with the populist poet Robert Pinsky in a surprisingly pandering program of poetry and music. This year, Takacs has joined up with the traditional Hungarian folk music group Muzsikas to explore the Hungarian source material found in the music of Bartok and Kodaly.

This sort of thing is something of a trend. The German period instrument ensemble Concerto Koln and the Turkish folk musicians of Sarband have just put out a recording that contrasts 17th and 18th century Turkish sources with fashionably Turkish-inspired music by Mozart and his contemporaries. The CD is entertaining but more amusing gimmick than revealing musicology.

To a degree the same could be said of the Takacs/Muzsikas collaboration presented in Royce Hall at UCLA Thursday night.

Both groups are wonderful at what they do, and it is fun not only to hear how peasant dance music was transformed into concert music by Bartok, but to witness the contrast of styles of the two ensembles. Takacs seems to work harder, the players in their chairs, their eyes plastered upon printed scores, their effort directed toward getting inside sound.

But it is also to their credit that they held their own against the entertaining members of Muzsikas, who make it look easier. These four Hungarian string players stand, play from memory, move, dance. The singer Marta Sebestyen also joined in with her reedy tone, soulful style and percussive feet.

It is fascinating and fun to hear how Muzsikas mimics, say, the sound of Hungarian bagpipes, how the singer spectacularly parodies them and how Bartok and Kodaly more seriously adapt the bagpipe effects into their own styles. The classical composers, though, can seem a bit dour in this context, taking their folk music ever so seriously. Indeed, it appears that Hungarian bagpipers are all but extinct, precisely because the parodies turned their music into cliches. Daniel Hamar, Muzsikas’ bass player, told the audience he knows of only one left, and he is in his 90s.

Someone should study the urge to transcribe that so compels some musicians. Here we heard Romanian folk dances in original recordings, then transcribed in folk style by Muzsikas, then transcribed for string quartet from Bartok’s piano transcriptions of the original. The artist Marcel Duchamp once said that a painting only has a life span of 40 years and then it dies. And as the evening wore on, the suspicion began to take hold that some of this folk material may be surviving on elaborate musicological life support.

That impression came about in part because the real revelation of the evening was the Takacs’ performance of Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet, a work of high Modernist abstraction without evident folk sources. Muzsikas and Sebestyen boldly added interjections between the work’s five movements.

So hearing haunting Hungarian night music played on flute followed by Bartok’s night sounds and insect music in the slow movement, it suddenly became clear that this was music meant to evoke the wonder that Bartok felt when he went into the country to live with and record folk musicians. Bartok’s greatest music is not about the folk music that he adapted but is about what it meant to him to experience it, to drink it deeply and profoundly from the source. He was happiest, he often said, in the field with his clumsy early recording equipment, and that is the Bartok of the Fourth Quartet.

By having the Fourth Quartet, one of Bartok’s most tightly woven masterpieces, interrupted with external music between movements, Takacs could not maintain all the mounting intensity that typically characterizes its interpretations of the work. But in losing focus it found freedom, that air I have always missed in its playing. The piece stopped and started. It sounded less like composed music and more like music made for the moment. Muzsikas egged on Takacs, and it responded with a spectacular performance.