Page 483 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Rich intimacy: Doric String Quartet at the Aldeburgh Festival
Bartók concerts, Aldeburgh Festival ★★★★☆

One way to measure a festival is by the quality of its audience. And audiences don’t come more
rapt and attentive than those at the Aldeburgh Festival. They’ll take anything director Roger
Wright will throw at them, and come back for more.

They needed that stamina on Friday, when the excellent young Doric String Quartet – alumni of
the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme – played all six quartets by fearsome Hungarian
modernist Béla Bartók, divided across three concerts. Listening to these in one afternoon is like
reading TS Eliot’s Waste Land and Rilke’s Duino Elegies at a single sitting. They are monuments to
the modernist impulse to renovate and intensify the artistic language, but at the same time they
are a very human record of one man’s particular journey. The first two quartets are super-intense,
almost over-wrought, with hints of the Balkan folk music that obsessed Bartók only beginning to
peep through. In the third and fourth they step centre stage, but so abstracted and purified it’s as if
those wheezing hurdy-gurdy and violin melodies have turned to steel. In the final two the clashing-
metal dissonance and rigour softens, and in the sixth a sense of impending tragedy as Bartók faced
the collapse of his world in 1940 is nakedly revealed.

Some quartets emphasise the constructivist rigour of this almost superhuman music, others bring
out the stomping peasant vigour. These performances by the Doric Quartet were wonderful
because they simply revealed the music in all its rich humanity, and gave it a special intimate
quality I’d never been aware of before. The opening of the Third Quartet, the most aggressively
dissonant of the six, had the same tender diffidence as the opening of the hyper-romantic First,
where the players gave a lovely drooping grace to the sad opening duet. But they projected the
staggering energy of these quartets too, not through sheer volume but by remembering the dictum
of Bartók’s friend Zoltán Kodály. “Bartók’s music is like an arrow” he said, and that’s how it
sounded here, with each hectic, close-knit phrase seeming to run forwards into the future.