Microcosmos Quartet, Béla Bartók & Tom Cone's Laughing Ghost
Sunday, November 16, 2014
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| Tom Cone - 1947 - 2012 |
Béla Bartók wrote six
string quartets. His fifth he composed in 1934. Eighty years later I heard it
for the first time with a laughing ghost over my shoulder.
Thanks to (because might
be a better choice of word) the Microcosmos String Quartet headed by Marc
Destrubé on violin, Andrea Siradze, violin, Rebecca Windham, cello and Tawnya
Popoff on viola, I found this work uncommonly lyrical. How is this possible?
Perhaps it has to do
with the fact that for the last year I have heard Bartók’s first four quartets,
more than once in concerts held in pleasant surroundings, homes of music lovers,
all performed by the Microcosmos Quartet. With those Bartok compositions I have
also listened to all (three) of Benjamin Britten’s string quartets.
With the 20th
century over ever so most definitely it was about time I was exposed to this
kind of music. It is the purpose and goal of Microcosmos (info on the reason
for this name here) to promote this kind of music that is so underplayed which
has been at the same time so influential. I sometimes think that Bartók is in
the same camp of notoriety/fame as Noam Chomsky. People know who he is but you
can never pin them down in being able to explain them.
Destrubé has helped us
the frequent concert goers to his quartet Bartók concerts to humanize and
soften the man. One story is that Bartók’s son Peter watched his father go into
his study, where he worked on his compositions, and close the door. Minutes later
he heard his father repeatedly laughing.
Sitting barely five
feet away from the quartet in this last nicely sunny afternoon I knew that the
surroundings of the house were familiar. Indeed I was in the house of Karen
Matthews, who was the partner of Vancouver
playwright and librettist Tom Cone. Everything in the house nicely smacked of
an interest in good books, design and art. In fact we were informed that many concerts
of new music have been played there.
Behind me there was a
nice young man with a smile on his face. The nice young man, Thomas Weideman,
born in 1992, was there to listen with us to the premiere (East
Vancouver premiere, that is) of his 2014 work changing at the same
time.
Between R. Murray Schafer’s
1970 String Quartet No. 1 and Bartók’s lyrical (at times!) String Quartet No. 5
we heard the quartet play, purely on their instrument’s harmonics, Weideman’s
soft and pleasing (a palate cleanser, Destrubé called it) piece.
Interesting to us,
since Destrubé always explains the facts and the story behind the works his
quartet plays, was learning that while most composers’ quartets put an effort to
bring together those two violins, viola and cello, Schafer had done the
opposite! The musicians all tried to escape one of a time from the constraints
of the composition.
If you add to the warm
surroundings with pleasant people the idea that a laughing ghost was present it
all added to a fine musical Sunday in which I can now attest that should I hear
any of those first five Bartók quartets in a recording or on the radio I just
might be able to identify that so serious Hungarian.
