Page 479 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

The extant quartets were composed after several juvenile efforts in the form and before the composer’s
death cheated the world of a commissioned seventh. Yet, in a strange way, what we have is the perfect
sequence: six profound essays that together apostrophise Bartók’s life and career. The thread they
share is an aversion to tunes for tunes’ sake. Melody came easily to the Hungarian composer (cf. the
Second Violin Concerto, the Third Piano Concerto, the Concerto for Orchestra) but he reserved the
quartet form for his most elevated utterances. That is why they reward close acquaintance, and why
these performances by the Doric String Quartet were revelatory.

The playing was homogeneous in the best sense. Bartók wrote for 16 strings rather than four players,
hence his use of the second violin as an equal to the first, and the Doric sound was an ideal fit for such
an approach. The players’ ensemble instincts were more cohesive and their colours more subtly shaded
than some glitzier accounts. Their playing was constantly alert to the music’s variety and variegation,
from the astonishing first movement of no. 1 with its melancholy, Berg-esque opening that gave way to
music redolent of a bird in flight as Alex Redington’s first violin soared over a cratered landscape,
through to the Adagio of no. 6 where a potentially affecting melody played on John Myerscough’s
eloquent cello was beautifully undercut by his colleagues’ fiercely unsentimental harmonies.

The First Quartet’s long, sinewy finale, at first glance a tangle of ideas yet with substance and method at
its core, gave way to a more traditionally structured no. 2 in a reading marked by exquisite phrasing and
a mellow ensemble. The opening movement sounded practically Classical; the second, though, was
given an abrasive energy in keeping with its folk-inspired material.

The Doric String Quartet

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