Carnegie Hall launches Bartok website featuring Emerson String Quartet
(May 2006)
In celebration of the 125th anniversary of Béla Bartók’s birth, Carnegie Hall’s website, has launched a fascinating interactive guide to Béla Bartók’s string quartets, which many consider to be his deepest and most influential body of work.
Visit the Bartók Quartets Performance Guide
Although the site is aimed at college-level string players and educators, it will prove engrossing for anyone interested in performing and understanding these challenging but supremely rewarding pieces.
The Emerson String Quartet, long associated with the Bartók cycle, is shown coaching young professional musicians during a Weill Music Institute Professional Training Workshop. Video segments show the quartet members sharing their personal thoughts and interpretation in some five hours’ worth of streaming video content. One can watch a young quartet play an excerpt while the score itself scrolls below.
“Bartók changed the sound of string quartets with these [pieces],” says the Emerson Quartet’s violist Lawrence Dutton at one point in the video. Decades after they were written (between 1908 and 1939), they still offer considerable technical and interpretive challenges to the player, and the Emerson’s members have 25 years’ worth of insights to contribute. Even if one is not a string player, it is illuminating to hear what these musicians have to say about the experience of performing these masterworks – quartets that, like those of Beethoven, sound as bracingly fresh as they did when they were heard for the first time.
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