TWIN FEATS

The Escher Quartet's Bartók marathon; Igor Levit's symphonic piano recital.

- ALEX ROSS

On March 28, 1949, at Times Hall, in midtown Manhattan, an unexpectedly large crowd materialized to hear the Juilliard Quartet play the second part of a two-concert survey of the six string quartets of Béla Bartók. According to the Times, so many seats were crammed onstage that the quartet "had just enough elbow room, and no more, for its performance." Mounted police monitored a crush of ticket seekers outside. The musical intelligentsia had turned out en masse.

In attendance was the serialist composer Milton Babbitt, who, in a commentary on the event, hailed Bartók's cycle as a "single, self-contained creative act." Also present was Dmitri Shostakovich, who had come to New York at Stalin's behest, in order to mouth propaganda at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace. Shostakovich, too, listened alertly; he had embarked on his own monumental quartet project. All told, the concert attested to Bartók's ascension, four years after his death, to the classical pantheon.

Formerly, composers of quartets had reckoned with the gigantic shadow of Beethoven. Now they also had to contend with a leaner, feistier ghost.

Bartók, like Igor Stravinsky and Alban Berg, had the fortune to be a popular modernist, appealing to a broad audience while keeping his place in the twentieth-century vanguard. His quartets exhibit an extraordinary degree of motivic coherence, their structures often extrapolated from a core motto of five or six notes. The string writing is at once violently inventive and acutely expressive, incorporating guttural distortions of pitch, cawing glissandos, clattering bowing effects, and the "Bartók pizzicato," in which a string is plucked so hard that it snaps against the fingerboard.