On August 11, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival presents a first in its 51-year history: the Escher String Quartet performs all six of Bartók’s string quartets over the course of a single evening.
The quartets are landmark works that “represent one of the crowning achievements in the chamber music repertoire and firmly place Bartók as the 20th-century successor to the legacy of Beethoven,” says Brook Speltz, the Escher’s cellist, in a nod to Beethoven’s genre-defining 16 string quartets written roughly a century earlier.
The Escher—whose members also include violinists Adam Barnett-Hart and Brendan Speltz (Brendan and Brook are brothers) and violist Pierre Lapointe—gave a similar marathon performance of the quartets earlier this year, on March 10, in a concert at Alice Tully Hall presented by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In a review of that performance, The New Yorker praised the group’s virtuosity and musicality, noting their “near-miraculous control of pitch and coördination of rhythm” and “unerring balance of voices.” The venerable (and recently retired) Emerson String Quartet, who mentored the Escher, was the first ensemble to perform the Bartók string quartets in one evening (they first did so in 1981, to mark the centenary of Bartók’s birth), and The New Yorker noted that the Escher seemed “poised to carry forward the standard of flexible mastery that the Emersons exemplified for decades.”
Bartók wrote his quartets over the course of 31 years, beginning in 1908, when he was 27, and ending in 1939, when he was 58. (He died six years later, at the age of 64.) Presenting these works on a single program offers audiences a rare artistic insight, says Festival Artistic Director Marc Neikrug. “Composers who wrote string quartets throughout their lives—Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert come to mind—offer a wonderful perspective on their development,” Neikrug notes. “Bartók wrote one of the great cycles of quartets, which clearly affords a wonderful overview of his development as a composer over his lifetime. To have an ensemble that’s capable of presenting all six quartets, as the Escher is, provides an incredible opportunity to experience these magnificent works as a whole.”
Speltz notes that while “all of the Bartók string quartets are very different from one another,” what drew him to the works initially were “the raucous sonorities and invigorating rhythms each one contains.” The quartets are revelatory, Speltz adds, as they “showcase beautifully Bartók’s evolution as a composer and the evolution of the classical music world at large during the first four decades of the 20th century”—decades that “were witnessing huge changes in how music was composed, performed, and listened to. In the quartets,” Speltz continues, “Bartók successfully mixes influences once considered immiscible, such as the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Debussy with the complex rhythmic vitality and modal aspect of several folk songs Bartók collected and transcribed during his many ethnomusicological trips.”
Those first four decades of the 20th century were also times of major historical and political volatility, which is reflected in Bartók’s music as well. “I certainly feel that the otherworldly sadness portrayed in the last movements of quartets two and six are no accident,” Speltz notes, “as the Second Quartet was written during the First World War and the Sixth at the outset of the Second World War.” The run time for the Escher’s August 11 performance is three hours and fifteen minutes, which includes two intermissions, and that can lead to questions about the athleticism involved in playing these six string quartets in one go. “From a physical standpoint,” Speltz says, “Bartók’s music can be incredibly taxing. The searing intensity in certain passages requires immense effort, and if one isn’t careful, it can create tension in the muscles, which diminishes the ability to create sound. Mentally, complex rhythms and difficult passagework are spread out over a wide spectrum of emotional intent, so staying present is probably the most important thing.”
And when it comes to describing the experience as a whole, Speltz sums it up in two words: “Pure exhilaration,” he says. “The sheer magnitude of creativity, emotional power, and technical wizardry that went into these compositions is reason enough to spend a lifetime studying and enjoying them.”
While the Escher has given this one-night-only performance just a handful of times since their inaugural offering in Vail, Colorado, in 2021, there’s reason to be hopeful that they’ll give it again in the near future. “I’ve been performing the Bartók string quartets for nearly 20 years and still enjoy working on them and want to play them for many years to come,” Speltz says. “Playing the complete cycle, especially in one performance, is perhaps the most important artistic task I’ve been given. If my hands were to fall off the next day, I’d feel as though I at least accomplished something truly worthwhile.” by Amy Hegarty
