The Boston-based Borromeo String Quartet has had a long, fruitful association with the Library of Congress, just short of “quartet-in-residence,” which came to a peak Friday with a spectacular marathon presentation of all six Bartók quartets, performed on the Library’s Stradivarius instruments.
There is no more difficult repertoire than Bartók’s; the stacking of individual instrumental challenges on top of highly complex ensemble problems pushes the musicians to the edge, but it does not fall into the abyss of glossolalia (such as in works by Elliott Carter or Brian Ferneyhough) in which nothing makes any sense anyway. Wrong notes and rhythms in Bartók stick out as much as they do in Prokofiev or Copland’s works.
And the Borromeo had almost the full measure of this magisterial cycle. They do not eclipse the Emerson String Quartet’s legendary renditions of 20 years ago, but they are awfully good. It’s an imperfectly matched ensemble (first violinist Nicholas Kitchen’s personality and playing dominate the group) and their practice of reading from full scores on laptops has changed the tenor of their interactions (instead of looking at one another, they are focused on their screens as though playing an intense video game), but one could only salute and applaud the results. The two most formidable movements, the Scherzos from the Fourth and Fifth quartets, were dispatched flawlessly, and at every turn the group made the music sound natural and magical.
In an undertaking of this magnitude, there could always be quibbles. Some may have wished for more savagery in the biting chords in the Third Quartet, there were stray intonation problems in the colorful First Quartet, and the group could make a little more of Bartók’s detailed phrasing marks. But the sustained cheering during the long standing ovation at the close was heartfelt and fully deserved.
Battey is a freelance writer.
