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The Borromeo Quartet looks outward from Vienna
BY DAVID WEININGER
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The city of Vienna is so routinely held to be the cradle and summit of all things Western that we often forget its proximity, both geographic and cultural, to Eastern Europe. The famously indefinite patch of land known as Mitteleuropa straddled two regions of the continent, and its artistic milestones drew equally on the time-sanctioned traditions of the West and the supposedly wild and untamed Other of the East. Bringing this reciprocal nature of Viennese musical life back into view is one of the aims of the Borromeo String Quartet’s upcoming series of concerts at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Although many of Brahms’s works were steeped in the gypsy style of the time (the so-called "stile hongroise"), the Borromeos are seeking to connect him to more recent trends, pairing each of his string quartets with a 20th-century Eastern European work. The first concert, this Sunday, pairs Brahms’s First Quartet with the Officium Breve in Memoriam, Andreae Szervansky, by the contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág. "I think it’s interesting whenever you’re looking at anything connected to Vienna to remember what was on the Eastern side, and bring to light the very important kinds of connections and nourishment that ran toward the West," says first-violinist Nicholas Kitchen over the phone. "We like letting those pieces reflect in each other these interesting kinds of features." Another goal of the Gardner series is to reaffirm Brahms’s artistic proximity to the 20th century. "One forgets also how Brahms was such a big influence on people like Schoenberg," Kitchen notes. Schoenberg was in turn an influence on Kurtág, as well as on György Ligeti, whose outstanding First Quartet will be paired with Brahms’s Second on December 7. But of even greater importance to both these Hungarians was Bartók, their compatriot and the century’s greatest synthesizer of Eastern folk traditions and Western modernism. Bartók’s six quartets — the century’s pre-eminent cycle — are specialties of the Borromeos: their last two years at the Gardner have been devoted to playing all of them, something they’ve also done many times in a single marathon concert. "You really feel as if you were following that next step [beyond Bartók]," says Kitchen of the Kurtág and Ligeti works. "But as often happens with Beethoven, it’s not necessarily that that step is more complicated, just because in Bartók, the complexity and the genius of the music is astounding. You keep discovering that it’s even richer than you thought it was. And I know we’re having the same experiences with the Ligeti and Kurtág, but we’re a bit further along the road with Bartók." The quartet even finds connections between Bartók and the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu, whose third quartet will share the program with Brahms’s final work in the genre, Opus 67, in the final concert of the series, February 1. "There’s a much gentler and more playful side of Bartók that doesn’t always make such an impression," Kitchen explains, "and though we’re not trying to make connections between the two, it’s interesting that you sense a kind of continuity between the more gentle nature of Bartók and the sort of whimsical side of Martinu." Coming back to Brahms: I ask Kitchen about the perception that the string quartets, though offering plenty of musical craftsmanship, don’t quite rank up there with the very greatest of the composer’s chamber music. "I do think there is something a little harder to grasp about the way the textures come together. He just has a little more freedom with a string sextet or viola quintet." Familiarity, though, has softened this impression; for Kitchen, the foursome’s immersion in these Brahms pieces has brought home not only their genius but each work’s defining idiom as well. The C-minor quartet "is like a storm hitting — a very energetic, very dramatic, driven piece." In the third quartet, he says, "I have the impression that Brahms had studied so much of the way Haydn writes quartets. It represents a more sophisticated range of imagination. You get the real transparency of a Haydn dialogue." And the second? "Personally, I have the most affection for this one. There’s a kind of generous expression that comes through the whole quartet which, for me, puts that piece into the category of the most sublime of Brahms’s works." The Borromeo String Quartet opens its season this Sunday, September 21, at 1:30 p.m. at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 280 the Fenway. Tickets, which include museum admission, are $20; call (617) 278-5150.
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