Putting Bartok’s string quartets in context

One of the best ways to get to know a composer’s works is to hear them in sequence. That’s what the Penderecki String Quartet is enabling us to do with a survey of Bela Bartok’s six string quartets at the L.A. County Museum of Art’s Leo S. Bing Theater.

Monday, violinists Jeremy Bell and Jerzy Kaplanek, violist Christine Vlajk and cellist Simon Fryer began with Quartets 1 and 2. Tonight they will play 3 and 4; and next Monday, the final two.

By adding a late Beethoven quartet to each program, they are also suggesting influences, links and the passing of the creative torch from one genius to another.

The latter idea was reinforced Monday when they started with Beethoven’s last quartet (No. 16, Opus 135) and followed it with Bartok’s first. The connection was weakened a little, however, because Opus 135 is a surprisingly sunny work, far less probing than its immediate predecessors, while Bartok’s No. 1, Opus 7, is a young man’s struggle to find a way out of depression.

Bartok called the first movement of the quartet, composed in 1907 to 1909, “my funeral dirge” -- referring to a failed romance he embodied in the music by means of a pitch code that alludes to his lover’s name. The Penderecki musicians painted an emotional landscape that began with almost sweet sadness, then mounted to anguish and anger.

The work is somewhat diffuse, stylistically meandering (with echoes of Impressionism as well as late 19th century Germanic chromaticism), but always personal and subjective. Relief from the self comes only with immersion in the folk idioms of the final movement.

The Second Quartet, written in 1915 to 1917, already is a different world. In the hands of the Penderecki players, the composer’s voice became markedly more mature, representative, inclusive. Bartok built the piece by assembling smaller bits of material. Folk influences are embedded, not alluded to. But most important, the quartet ends abruptly and enigmatically. It’s 1917, after all, World War I is not yet over, and Bartok sees no easy solutions. The quartets to follow, as the Pendereckians will show, became even more thorny and complex.

Beethoven titled the last movement of Opus 135 “The Difficult Decision,” penning the question “Must it be?” above the initial motif. He inverted the motif as the answer, writing above it, “It must be!” and immediately repeating both that and the motif for good measure.

Whatever the composer meant has been famously argued over since, but the music goes on to skirt any depths. He had plumbed many before. He left a few for his successors, such as Bartok.

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Penderecki String Quartet

Where: Leo S. Bing Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: Today and April 19, 8 p.m.

Price: $14-$18

Contact: (323) 857-6010