Page 484 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Another thing that made these performances a joy was the luminous beauty of sound, and the
perfect tuning. This showed that those notoriously “gritty” harmonies, where close-knit chords fan
out above and below an imagined mirror (Bartók was pitiless in his musical logic) can sound
thrilling and persuasive. There were flashes of humour here and there, especially in the pert
pizzicato dialogues in the Fourth Quartet, and the sudden moment of hurdy-gurdy-like innocence
in the Fifth. In the final quartet the players made the sad slow opening melody that began each
movement seem more and more pathetic on each appearance. Each time it was brusquely pushed
aside by satire or galumphing energy, until in the last movement it was finally accepted. We felt the
gathering tragedy of a man and an entire civilisation, in those final broken phrases.

To let us down gently after all that furious concentration, while staying in the same musical
climate, the composing/performing electronic duo of Selena Kay and Cerys Hogg (known
collectively as KOGG) together with the Ligeti Quartet offered engaging late-evening musings on
the folk-melodies Bartók collected from all over the Balkans. Shards of Bartók’s violin concerto
and other works mingled with relaxed percussion grooves and snatches of the folk-recordings he
made more than a century ago, while on a screen above we saw lovely old footage of Hungarian
folk-dancing. Those images brought us closer to Bartok’s roots, but the laid-backness of the music
seemed very 21st-century, and a million miles from Bartók’s fraught intensity. IH

The Aldeburgh Festival runs until June 26; brittenpearsarts.org. Hear highlights on BBC Radio 3