November
8, 2008
Music History
Comes Alive with Takács, Muzsikás, and Márta
Sebestyén
by Jeffrey Rossman
Durham,
NC: Most people who have taken even the broadest music history
class have encountered the part where you read about several major
composers who have, at least in part, relied on folk music
from their cultures as a basis for some of their compositions. The
Czech composer Antonín Dvořák even crossed
nationalities and used indigenous American music in several of his
greatest works, including his cello concerto. Most of us have just
taken this book learnin' at its face value but have never really
experienced the actual musical relationship between folk and
European concert music – that is, until this concert.
In
the past decade, the Takács
Quartet
has become a frequent visitor to Duke
University,
generally as part of the Chamber Arts Society's presentations.
They are considered one of the finest and most elegant string
quartets in the world, but this time they shared a wonderfully
unique program that explored the relationship between Béla
Bartók and the folk music of their native Hungary. Joining
them was the Hungarian string band Muzsikás
and the remarkable vocalist Márta
Sebestyén.
This was definitely not going to be your father's chamber music
concert – in fact, it turned out to be revelatory, educational,
and quite simply one of the most musically enlightening
experiences that I have encountered.
Muzsikás began the
show, and at first it seemed that the level of playing didn't
belong on the same stage as the Takács Quartet, but that
quickly changed. They began with "Dances from Transylvania."
which can best be described as Hungarian bluegrass. After that, we
were introduced to the exotic (to us) instruments that this group
played. Spokesman Dániel Hamar played bass, sang, and also
played an instrument called the gardon. While it looks like a
viola da gamba, it is actually more of a percussion instrument.
Péter Éri played viola and mandolin and sang, but
his featured instrument was a very long flute with which he
produced vocal sounds while playing. Mihály Sipos and
László Porteleki were primarily fiddlers. We even
got to hear several original wax cylinders of this fascinating
music.
When Hamar said that you can hear folk music
influences on nearly every measure of Bartók's music,
including such complex and modern works as his fourth string
quartet, most people, including me, thought, "yeah right –
show me!" They did just that. The Takács Quartet then
came out to play this epochal work but with a huge difference –
between each movement, various members of Muzsikás and
singer Sebestyén displayed the origins of the musical
material used in Bartók's fourth quartet. As expected,
Takács played with nearly unbelievable technical
brilliance, but it was this immediate juxtaposition of the music
of the peasants and the apex of 20th century classical music that
was truly revelatory – it completely changed the way I will
always listen to Bartók. One of the many fascinating
features of this was the origin of the famous "Bartók
Pizzicato," which was first played on the gardon and then in
the Bartók Quartet.
The second half
continued in much the same vein as these two seemingly disparate
worlds showed how they are one on the same continuum. Several of
Bartók's forty-four violin duos were played, and this
relationship became even more pronounced. By this time all nine
musicians were on stage whether or not they were playing, and the
more relaxed, even party atmosphere prevailed over the usual staid
string quartet concert. The violin duos were shared by Károly
Schranz, second violinist of Takács, and Sipos, of Muzsikás
– a very passionate and lively player. The cultural differences
were stark and somewhat amusing as Sipos, dancing while playing,
tried to get the "classical" violinist Schranz to join
in – but he would have none of that! After all of the mostly
upbeat and up tempo works, one of the most moving moments came in
a ballad called "Ballad of the Murdered Shepherd."
Sebestyén was mesmerizing and unearthly along with violin
and vocal-induced flute.
This remarkable evening ended
with a transcription for strings of Bartók's well-known
Romanian Folk Dances. Unlike the quartets and other abstract
works, the six dance melodies of this collection are explicitly
based on folksongs that Bartók himself collected during
field trips in Hungary from 1910-14. By the end, this became a
glorious jam session with everyone playing, although, in demeanor,
the difference in the two camps was quite marked. While all
members of Muzsikás played without music, standing up and
moving around the stage, the Takács Quartet remained
anchored in their chairs, relatively motionless, and glued to
their music. This is perhaps a topic for sociological
musicologists, but it was of very little consequence to the
listener.
With all the anguish and hand wringing over
shrinking audiences, this concert was a jewel to display what
creative music programming can be. There is a real hunger from
audiences for something other than the standard formulaic
classical concert, and this one showed, using established artists,
that if they build it they will come. Kudos to Duke Performances
and its director Aaron Greenwald for taking a big step towards a
new concert experience.
November
11, 2008
Takacs and
friends revel in Bartok's folk-inspired art
by Donald
Rosenberg / Plain Dealer Reporter
String quartets show up so often on programs of the
Cleveland Chamber Music Society that the organization might more
accurately be called the Cleveland String Quartet Society.
Who's
to complain? Much of the music for two violins, viola and cello is
among the most transcendent in Western civilization. Even so, it
was a breath of fresh sonic air when the Takacs Quartet, one of
the world's great string quartets, shared the stage Tuesday at
Beachwood's Fairmount Temple Auditorium with the Muzsikas ensemble
and vocalist Marta Sebestyen.
The subject was Bela Bartok,
and not just his classical side. In a series of compelling twists,
the musicians explored the origins of Bartok's art by juxtaposing
Hungarian folk materials he had collected with original works that
ensued. Few composers so brilliantly transformed one art form into
another.
What an edifying experience it was to hear rustic
dances rubbing shoulders with the radical explosions they became.
The Takacs, Sebestyen and Muzsikas, a quartet of inspired
Hungarian folk musicians, demonstrated the metamorphosis to most
striking effect with Bartok's String Quartet No. 4.
The
five-movement score is a radical, tightly organized creation full
of slashing rhythms, haunting "night" music and distant
harmonic regions. Listening to the earthy, seductive Muzsikas
players - Mihaly Sipos, Laszlo Porteleki, Peter Eri, Daniel Hamar
- animate the sources of the Fourth Quartet helped clarify the
version that Bartok made completely his own.
The Takacs
musicians - violinists Edward Dusinberre and Karoly Schranz,
violist Geraldine Walther, cellist Andras Fejer - were as urgent
and eloquent here as they'd been when the ensemble (with former
violist Roger Tapping) performed Bartok's six quartets during one
concert at Severance Hall in 2002.
The roots of several
Bartok violin duos were revealed Tuesday both in archival
recordings, which the composer made during travels around his
homeland, and through folk tunes the Muzsikas musicians and
Sebestyen performed. The Bartok pieces themselves had mesmerizing
heroes in the Takacs' Schranz and Muzsikas' Sipos (who fairly
danced as he played).
At one point, Sebestyen used her
slender, focused voice to delightful effect to simulate a bagpipe,
though only Hungarian members of the audience could savor the
seemingly bawdy text.
In a string transcription of Bartok's
Rumanian Folk Dances, the alternation of Muzsikas flair (and
flutist Eri's tender simplicity) and Takacs sophistication opened
new windows to the composer's vibrant achievement.
November
14, 2008
Back to
Bartók's musical roots
By David Weininger,
Globe Correspondent
It's
a commonplace of music history that Bartók was a keen
student of the folk music of his native Hungary. The songs,
laments, and dances that he discovered in villages throughout the
country left an audible imprint on his music.
Parsing through
those borrowings sounds like an unenviable dry task. But two
groups have joined up to show that it can be compelling and
entertaining, too. Since 2001, the Takács Quartet and the
Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikás have been playing concerts
in which they interweave movements of Bartók works with the
traditional music on which he drew in writing them. They'll
present the program on Sunday at Jordan Hall. (Hungarian vocalist
Márta Sebestyén will also be on hand.)
Speaking
by phone from Chicago, Edward Dusinberre, the Takács's
first violinist, offers a glimpse of how the arrangement works
with Bartók's Fourth String Quartet, one of his more
gnarled and elusive works. "The second movement has a very
mysterious, spooky color - we're all playing with mutes and very
fast," he says. Just before the quartet plays it, one of the
four members of Muzsikás plays a similar dance tune on an
instrument that resembles a bass recorder.
"The effect
of that, when you hear the second movement, is that you suddenly
realize that the strange colors that Bartók gives us were
very likely inspired by particular folk sounds rather than by some
sort of abstract idea," he explains. "In a sense, the
effect is to humanize the piece - it sort of breaks it wide
open."
Another example is the quartet's fourth
movement, played completely in pizzicato and featuring an effect
Bartók is widely credited with inventing: plucking a string
so hard that it snaps against the fingerboard. Prior to hearing
the movement, the bassist of Muzsikás plays a melody on a
gardon, which Dusinberre describes as a small cello with a
percussive sound.
"And the sounds that it makes are very
similar to the sort of snap pizzicatos that we do on our
instruments," he says. "You suddenly realize . . . it's
not like he dreamed them out of nothing."
While the
quartet takes up much of the concert's first half, the centerpiece
of the second half is Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances, in
which the two groups alternate playing the original dances and the
composer's interpretations of them. Again, having the original
versions in their ears transforms what the quartet members do.
"I
feel like I'm trying to meet the guys in the middle,"
Dusinberre says. "If I have to play the same tune that I've
just heard them play, I'm going to listen to their phrasing and
colors; at the same time, it's not going to sound exactly the
same, and that's part of the interest."
Not only do
these joint concerts provide the Takács with a way to delve
into Bartók's roots; Dusinberre says that their presence
affects the whole concert experience, especially in the Fourth
Quartet. "I'm a bit jealous of those guys on stage, because
they don't have music in front of them, they're standing up.
They're very fluid and vital in the way they communicate with each
other. So our challenge during that program is very much to feed
off their vitality and energy.
"Of course we have energy
of our own," he continues, "but I think we're inspired
to take more risks and play more on the edge than we might do in a
usual concert. It helps us to play with more abandon and just kind
of let our hair down."
November
16, 2008
Inspired Music
Lesson from Takács Quartet and Muzsikás
by
David
Patterson
One of the earliest folk music archivists as well as one of the most original composers of the 20th century, Béla Bartók considered the folk melodies of his country’s villages as equal to the greatest works of music coming out of the tradition of Bach and Beethoven. In a similar way, our American countryman, Pete Seeger, spoke out about music of the folk: such “songs are sneaky things. They can slip across borders …Penetrate hard shells…I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.” It did for Bartók and for history.
The renowned Takács Quartet and the legendary folk outfit Muzsikás teamed up for a program of compositions by Bartók and a rich selection of folk music from their country for the Celebrity Series of Boston at Jordan Hall on November 16. Also in on this atypical musical offering-lesson-appeared Márta Sebestyén, “skylark,” as she is known in her native country. Some may remember her singing in the movie, The English Patient.
A near sold-out Jordan Hall fixated on Hungarian music. Several of Bartók’s own field recordings were played back. An incredible vocal imitation of the bagpipes was rendered by Sebestyén. There was the “Ballad of the murdered shepherd,” a sad, enchanting melody, conveyed with heart and an instrumental-like voice she says comes from the skylark. In Hungary, when the workers in the fields take a breather, wiping the sweat from their foreheads, notice the bird singing, they say, “What a gift, thank you skylark!”
There were bear and stick dances. Many of the dances came from Transylvania, Moldavia, and Romania. But no matter the where: Bartók only wanted what was pure. These and other folk songs and dances tied into composer’s life were interspersed with his String Quartet No. 4, a sonatina and a set of violin duos. There was the sound of the Takács Quartet and that of Muzsikás, who also presented their music on the citera, koboz, mandolin, long flute, three-stringed bass and gardon-all Hungarian instruments.
What happens when two such potent and opposite forces, the folkish and the artistic, combine? A program note asserts, “juxtaposing Bartók’s compositions with their related folk counterparts… illuminates the connections between Hungary’s most famous composer and the music of its people.” For Bartók, folk music is not merely dressed up in art music; rather, the two breeds bond in a new, distinct voice to capture, on a very real and personal level, the feelings, atmospheres, and rituals of Hungarian life, those of the peasant in particular, the pure, which so appealed to him. The uneven counting of indigenous dance rhythms, the melodies cast in Hungarian scales and the drones, especially bagpipe-like ones, emerge in his highly crafted Central European music mix.
Combine two ensembles, Muzsikás, meaning musicians who play the traditional folk music of Hungary, with the Takács Quartet whose repertoire spreads across European ground on which Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms lived. On Sunday afternoon, the two identities flickered and flashed between folkways and artistic ways.
Who has ever listened to Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, most of its five movements each followed by a folk song or dance?
What
a wondrous time! Borders were crossed. This was a whole new
experience, a brand new creation for concertgoers. The nine
Hungarians (two of them “honorary,” as pointed out by the MC)
transformed this Bartók into “folk-art.” All too often
his quartets are delivered with severity-even morbidity, but not
here. Takács took each movement into moods that peasants
would have taken to. With the arrival of the third, slow movement
came a moment of very rare beauty, deep, nearly overwhelming. And
there was fun in the fourth movement and rustic ecstasy in the
final movement.
The program concluded with Bartók’s
most often heard and performed pieces, his Romanian Folk
Dances.
For these two hours or so, Hungarian music lit up heart
and mind. The experience with Takács Quartet, Muzsikás,
Sebestyén, and Bartók was long overdue. Not a
graduate seminar by any means, their program led to summits of
discovery through the act of showing rather than telling-as Bartók
well might have had it. We were at the source. Were only more of
our learning such that could, at once, bring joy and be so moving,
pure like the skylark, where many of the senses are completely
absorbed, naturally. This was an afternoon of and by the
Hungarians, at once beautiful, moving, and
illuminating.
Appreciation goes to Boston Celebrity Series and
to Susan Pravda and Gabor Garai, Honorary Consul General of
Hungary, and the Hungarian Society of Massachusetts.
David Patterson, Professor of Music and Chairman of the Department at U. Mass Boston for the past 15 years, was recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award in Teaching and the Chancellor’s Distinction in Teaching Award. Also a composer, he lives in Watertown.
http://classical-scene.com/2008/11/16/inspired-music-lesson-from-takacs-quartet-and-muzsikas/
PERFORMING
ARTS
November 17, 2008.
Takács
String Quartet
by Joan
Reinthaler
For years, Bartók's music has been the subject (some might say, the victim) of obsessive analysis: Is this chord the mashed-together notes of that tune? Does the Fibonacci series really govern his structures? Can any of these subtleties actually be heard and does anyone besides a musicologist care?
The Takács String Quartet, Muzsikás (an ensemble devoted to the preservation and performance of Hungarian folk music) and singer Márta Sebestyén have teamed up for an alternative approach to understanding Bartók, one that's transparent and a whole lot more fun for the rest of us by posing this question: How have folk traditions influenced the music of this folk-obsessed composer?
The two groups collaborated on a high-energy and engaging folk-Bartók crossover program at the Library of Congress on Friday, which had audience members not only tapping their feet during the folk bits, but giggling at abrupt quirks in the Fourth String Quartet. How often have you seen an audience find anything in his quartets amusing? Engrossing, challenging and powerful, certainly. But amusing?
The program was elegantly structured. It began with a group of Hungarian folk pieces, the four members of Muzsikás sawing away as if at a country hoedown, sometimes on conventional strings and sometimes on traditional instruments (recorder, mandolin and a thumped and plucked gardon). By the time the Quartet No. 4 made its appearance, the phrase shapes and textures that Bartók had soaked up from his folk music studies were firmly in the ear. There were dances and songs (sung hauntingly by Sebestyén) interpolated between movements and a seamless handoff from a Muzsikás violin to a Takács violin in the third movement.
Several of Bartók's Violin Duos, his "Sonatina on Themes From Transylvania" and the familiar "Romanian Folk Dances" followed, all interspersed with their relevant folk ancestors and, as the concert went on, the boundaries between folk and classical and between the two performing ensembles became harder to discern. It was superbly done.
Bartók transcribed folk songs from recordings made on wax cylinders in the field, and several of these were played during the evening -- a scratchy and ghostly, but fascinating, message from the past.
Kultúra
2008. 11. 17.
Külföldön méltatják a magyar népzene előadóit
-MTI
A Takács Vonósnégyes, a Muzsikás együttes és Sebestyén Márta népdalénekes egy élvezetes koncert keretében újszerű megközelítést kínált Bartók Béla megértéséhez - írta hétfő számában a The Washington Post című napilap a művészek közös fellépéséről a Kongresszusi Könyvtárban.
A
két vonósnégyes és a népdalénekes
múlt pénteken tartott telt házas koncertet az
amerikai főváros egyik legnevesebb épületében,
a Capitolium mögött álló Kongresszusi
Könyvtárban.
Az újság szerint a
Takács-Sebestyén-Muzsikás közös
produkció alternatív megközelítése
világos és üdítő: arra a kérdésre
keres választ, hogyan hatottak a népi hagyományok
Bartók zenéjére.
A két
vonósnégyes erőteljes és magával
ragadó, egymásba fonódó programot
adott elő. A közönség a lábával
dobolt a népi ritmusokat hallva, és még a IV.
vonósnégyes alatt sem volt csöndben, időnként
bekurjantásokkal nyilvánította ki tetszését.
"Milyen gyakran látni olyan közönséget,
amelyik szórakoztatónak találja Bartók
vonósnégyeseit? Magával ragadónak,
felvillanyozónak és erőteljesnek,
természetszerűleg. De szórakoztatónak?"
- olvasható a The Washington Post cikkében.
A
lap nagyra értékelte a műsor "elegáns
szerkezetét", azt, ahogy a Muzsikás népi
dallamai, Sebestyén Márta dalai egymásba
kulcsolódtak a Takács Vonósnégyes
klasszikus tételeivel. "Pompás előadás"
- örvendezett a kritikus, aki külön kiemelte, hogy
a koncert során több archív felvételt is
bejátszottak Bartók népzenei gyűjtéséből.
"Karcos és fátyolos, de csodálatos
üzenet a múltból" - zárta cikkét
a The Washington Post írója.
A Takács
Vonósnégyes, a Muzsikás együttes és
Sebestyén Márta kéthetes amerikai turnén,
hat városban szerepel. A két négytagú
együttes és az énekes 2002 óta lép
fel a Bartók Béla és a népzene
kapcsolatáról szóló műsorral; a
korábbi években már Európában
és Amerikában is turnéztak, a New York-i
Carnegie Hallba is meghívták őket. A mostani
körúton fellépnek a többi között
Clevelandben, Bostonban és Los Angelesben.
November
19, 2008
MUSIC REVIEW
Bartok's
music meets its muse
By Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff
Any music appreciation class will tell you that Bela Bartok was influenced by folk music of the Hungarian countryside, but what exactly does that mean? A fascinating program on Sunday afternoon in Jordan Hall explored this question by placing two Hungarian ensembles side by side: the Takacs Quartet, which was founded in Budapest in 1975 and plays the composer's music with commanding authority, and Muzsikas, a Hungarian folk ensemble founded around the same time and devoted to older rural styles that once flourished in the very villages that Bartok visited with his Edison cylinder phonograph in hand.
The concert, presented by the Celebrity Series, had the two groups alternating in the spotlight, with the members of Muzsikas dispatching fiddle-driven dance tunes (from Transylvania, Moravia, and elsewhere) as well as some more lyrical traditional melodies rendered on the wispy long flute or sung with a reedy yet alluring tone by vocalist Marta Sebestyen. For its part, the Takacs Quartet lit into Bartok's String Quartet No. 4, playing with both superb ensemble musicianship and, at times, even more abandon than their folk band counterparts.
In the second half, violinists from the two ensembles joined together for some of Bartok's Duos and the final set was a medley of the composer's famous Romanian Folk Dances interwoven with performances of their source tunes. Overall, the onstage chemistry between the two groups was fairly limited, and Sebestyen and the members of Muzsikas at times seemed less than fully at ease in this classical setting. The exception was Daniel Hamar, Muzsikas's avuncular, barrel-chested bass player who served as the afternoon's good-humored emcee. For the very last selection, both groups came together for a high-spirited dash through a Romanian "Maruntel" or "Quick Dance."
To be sure, this program had a terrific idea behind it and the musical performances by both groups were often richly satisfying, but the points of genuine illumination and contact were fewer than one might have hoped for. What Bartok heard and what he actually wrote were sometimes easily connected, as with the violin duos, but more often the connections are less linear, and this program seemed to have little interest in probing them more deeply. One wished in a way that its journey had begun precisely where it ended.
Bartok's relationship to folk music was complex, filtered through levels of Romantic idealization and modernist striving. He saw folk music as a way of renewing the energies of a classical tradition exhausted by 19th-century grandeur; the music of rural peoples, living close to nature and to a life of authentic expression, could show the way forward. For Bartok, the peasants he met were primitive, perhaps, but also unwitting musical pioneers - avant-gardists with mud on their boots.
Sunday's program included a few tantalizing excerpts from the composer's own field recordings, about a century old, distorted and warbly but still giving a glimpse into these historic encounters and whetting the appetite for more. The program would indeed have been stronger with more biographic materials, excerpts from the composers' writings and correspondence, and perhaps even imagery from some of the places he visited. These two ensembles have found the kernel of a musically rich, historically meaningful program; they should continue to develop it.
11/21/2008
The Classical Music Network
The
Phenomenal Bartók and Hungarian Folkmusic
Los
Angeles
Royce Hall, UCLA
by Thomas Aujero Small
Bela
Bartók’s string quartets are recognized as one of
mankind’s greatest achievements in music. They are exceedingly
modern, composed in an idiom that expresses the angst and pathos
of our lives as deeply and intensely as any music that has been
written before or since. In an important sense, the Bartók
quartets are as “new”, as profoundly radical as anything that
is being written today. The extraordinary thing about this concert
was that it revealed how closely that “newness” is related to
its historic roots in the folk music of the Eastern European
tavern, mountains and fields. In what might be described as an
instance of “extreme musical authenticity”, the folk group
Muzsikás and The Takács Quartet produced an evening
of devastatingly ineffable beauty and emotion. The singer Marta
Sebestyén seemed to have stepped out of a time machine, her
voice sang so evocatively from the depths of the 19th century.
The inspiration for a joint concert with this program came
from a suggestion by the renowned musicologist Joseph Horowitz at
the 2001 Aspen Music Festival. As an artistic advisor to music
ensembles, Horowitz has made this kind of cutting edge historical
inquiry the hallmark of many of his programs. But only these exact
musicians could perform this particular concert. Only these
performers have the training and background to play the Bartók
and the Hungarian Folk Music with this intensity of insight and
authenticity.
The evening began with the Muzsikás
ensemble playing seated, dressed in rough black and white, one of
them with a wide brimmed black hat shading his face. A distant
folk tune, a dirge like drone, gradually became a dance. As they
stood up to play, the music moved from hauntingly evocative to
exhilarating. At the end of the first piece, one of the Muzsikás
players came forward to introduce the concert, describing a folk
song to which Bartok devoted his life. They began by playing a wax
recording that Bartók himself had made of the song. Then
Marta Sebestyén sang the birdlike piece, accompanied by the
tall wooden flute. The Muzsikás players then performed folk
violin duets and a quartet, by turns elegiac and playful, joined
by more of Sebestyén’s haunting vocals. Next came a
string trio, with the gardon, a kind of cello used for percussion
on both the strings and the body of the instrument. Bartók’s
melodies and harmonies clearly grew out of this tradition.
When
the Takács Quartet came onstage and began with the opening
Allegro to Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, their
bright, round, full modern sound made a striking contrast to the
Muzsikás ensemble. It was like stepping out of a painting
by Marc Chagall into the plain daylight of the modern world. The
next piece played by Muzsikás, Dance Music of Moldavia
with the flute, drum and lute was the clearly the immediate
inspiration for the Bartók quartet movement. The subsequent
series of pieces took the same form: The Takács segued
seamlessly into another quartet movement. Then the vocalist Marta
Sebestyén sang in a kind of metallic murmur that was
astonishingly also taken up by the Takács Quartet in their
next piece, with the silvery zinc sound of a babies cry and a
cello also like a human voice. A Muzsikás piece straight
out of a village taverna leaned heavily on the percussive quality
of the cello-like gardon, and led straight into the extreme
percussion of the otherworldly all-pizzicato movement from
Bartok’s Quartet No. 4.
After the intermission,
the first pieces were Bartók’s three Violin duos
from 1933, featuring both the composed versions and the original
versions from the folk tradition. The original sources were played
on recordings from Bartók’s archives, and Marta Sebestyén
also performed some of the source material vocally. Then Károly
Schranz from the Takács joined Mihály Sipos from
Muzsikás to perform the violin duos as Bartók wrote
them, offering a spectacular tonal contrast between the folk
violin and the modern classical violin.
The imitation of
the Hungarian folk bagpipe was another astounding musical
phenomenon. First, Marta Sebestyén demonstrated the
heartrending sound with her voice, an unearthly Eastern European
song from a distant past, eliciting cries of delight from the
audience. Then the Takács, with the addition of the
Muzsikás double bass, showed how Bartók loved to use
the same “imitation of the bagpipe” technique for the string
quartet. Marta Sebestyén used the technique again in her
rendition of the Ballad of the Murdered Shepherd, a
performance from a moonlit field at night that had the audience
whooping for her.
In the final pieces and the encore, the
Takács and Muzsikás ensembles alternated and then
joined to play together as one large group. In dark mist shrouded
tones and plaintive birdsong, in elegy and in dance, the two
groups were resplendently united by one musical spirit. The result
was an unforgettable evening that opened a window into an
astonishing universe.
The
International Review of Music
November
23, 2008
Live:Takacs,
Muzsikas, Sebestyen and Bartok
By Don Heckman
Bela Bartok was an ethnomusicologist before the term was invented. His early 20th century recordings of Magyar folk music are among the first actual documentation of the Asian origins of Eastern European folk music. Equally important, the material he heard and gathered had a profound impact upon his own compositions, transforming his style from late Romanticism to a unique synthesis of folk elements - especially rhythmically - and the rapidly emerging modernism of the 20th century.
All these factors were on full display Friday night in the UCLA Live presentation of the Takács String Quartet, the Muzsikás folk music ensemble and singer Márta Sebestyén at Royce Hall. The highly imaginative goal of the program was to illustrate — in living, full color fashion — the manner in which Bartok found common cause with Magyar folk music. And the results were as entertaining as they were informative.
The program’s first half began with several traditional pieces from Muzsikás - including a Transylvanian dance and a Transdanubian ugros and fast csardas. Sebestyén made her first appearance singing a flute melody with long flute player Peter Eri, displaying the penetrating, emotionally-edged sound that is at the heart of her singing.
But the centerpiece of the opening section was a shimmering rendering of Bartok’s String Quartet No. 4, a piece whose folk-derived elements provide a constant subtext to confident, sometimes aggressively dissonant modernism. Along with the String Quartet No. 3, it is among his most technically adventurous works, demanding that the players explore every aspect of their instruments, with movement No. 4’s Allegretto Pizzicato a stunning combination of digital virtuosity at the service of an irresistible musical flow.
The second half of the program dealt more directly with Bartok’s folk music associations by actually blending traditional pieces from Muzsikás and Sebestyén with Bartok’s Violin Duos, Sonatina on Themes From Transylvania and Rumanian Folk Dances. The Sonatina and the Violin Duos were introduced with transcriptions of folk music recorded by Bartok.
The synchronicity was fascinating, especially in passages such as the Violin Duo No. 44, in which the Takács Quartet’s violinist Károly Schranz performed with Mihály Sipos, one of Muzsikás’ violinists. Sebestyén’s solo vocal version of bagpipes - intriguing on its own - provided a fascinating contrast to the Takács Quartet’s reading of Bartok’s Bagpipers (from the Sonatina). And the frequent interplay between the ensembles - in which one or another player from the Takács Quartet would suddenly turn up with Muzsicás (and vice versa) was a constant highlight of the set. The final, buoyant individual segments of the Rumanian Folk Dances added a convincing coda to the evening’s compelling account of Bartok’s creative romance with his homeland’s ethnic musical roots. UCLA Live’s productions are always beguiling, but Artistic Director David Sefton outdid himself with this extraordinary program.
November
25, 2008,
Takács,
Muzsikás and Márta Sebestyén Quake Library of
Congress Stage
by
Sam
Buker
Let
me begin by admitting I’m in love with violinist Mihály
Sipos. Add to that this testament: I’ll never marry unless all
my friends and family pool together to pay Muzsikás the
handsome fee to play at my fires of Hymen!
For, despite my mad
adoration for the boys in Monument
Trio,
this Bela-Bartók-ian ho-down goes down as the Best Concert
of 2008.
Béla Bartók, with his genius for
creating pieces entirely novel in musical language, is sometimes
labeled “challenging” or “difficult.” As in WARNING:
NOT for the novitiate to the broader spectrum of “The Rest Is
Noise” classical.
This concert stamped that notion underfoot in about .5
seconds.
All Mihály had to do was draw his bow and
Dániel Hamar strike the ϋtögardon
between his knees, and traditional Hungarian music shook the
Library of Congress’ floors and walls… hitting 300 souls with
St. Vitus Dance. Who knew that Bela’s String Quartet No. 4, his
Four Violin Duos, or the Sonatina could do that? I walked out a
changed woman, to say the least.
What went down was a total
affirmation of the very idea that performance is a heart-beating,
breathing art. The superb Takács Quartet, shared the stage
with Muzsikás, and the searing and soulful vocalist Ms.
Márta Sebestyén, giving birth to something
practically unknown to the concert stage: sheer delight.
William
Blake, a man who knew bliss better than an evangelical claims to
know his Bible, sayeth: Energy
is Eternal Delight.
If Takács, Muzsikás, and Márta sang all
night, we’d have known a large measure of what Heaven oughta be
like.
Béla would surely agree. The extra touch that the
Library of Congress offered were the original wax cylinder
recordings that Bela, and fellow Hungarian Kodály,
collected, categorized and saved for the likes of us. The work was
physically arduous, but Béla said:
“People
are mistaken who believe it is horribly tiring, despairing work,
demanding great sacrifices. As far as I’m concerned, I can only
say that the time I spent on this work was the happiest of part of
my life. I would not relinquish it for anything on earth.
Praise
be — that these composers did it!
Nothing encapsulated
Béla’s scoring more than the ϋtögardon.
Hamar’s three strings, tuned to one tone, he hammered with a
stick, while snapping a thinner string, building tension ‘til
stick struck the body’s wood. His marvelous percussive cello
brought three different rhythms into unity: a rollicking
thump,snap and tap. Find it for yourself in Béla’s
Allegretto
pizzicato
of the Fourth String Quartet.
A collaboration never seemed so
seamless. We turned from Allegro
to Muzsikás’ building sound like an insect-enlivened
night to Márta’s sole voice, blending without a hitch,
into the melodic cello, resounding clear and deep, against the
tension of
Béla’s
non
troppo lento strings.
Mihály, all alone, bled straight from the Dance
of Gyimes
into the next movement of Bartók – Takács played
like improv jazz, fluid movements warming daring pauses.
This
told you everything that a musicologist would, with so much
thrusting and plucking, that you’d never realize you’re
learning
an awful lot about Bartók…and Hungary. Mihály,
descended of shepherds, looked out over the crowd like a man
gazing on rolling plains straight to the Carpathians.
His
joyful shrug of bow, his beaming grin, said it all: “It’s
simply me… simply my song.”