Bartok: From The Fields To The Concert Hall

By Tom Huizenga
May 6, 2009, 6:05 AM

Bartok in the village - Bela Bartok, left, stands at a window sill recording folk songs from Eastern European peasants in 1907. (Getty Images)

Classical music has never lived in a bubble, and there's always been a free flow of ideas intersecting so-called art music and folk music. In this concert from Boston, they all come together: The acclaimed Takacs String Quartet joins the Hungarian folk ensemble Muzsikas (with singer Marta Sebestyen) to celebrate one of Hungary's finest, composer Bela Bartok, who was brilliant at mixing the highbrow and lowbrow in his own music.

Bartok was born in 1881, near the border of Hungary and Romania, and his interest in the folk music from those two countries fueled much of his career as a composer and scholar.

Bartok lugged a bulky Edison phonograph out to remote villages to capture songs from the locals. He also notated songs, and by 1918 he had collected more than 9,000 Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Serbian tunes. He also edited folk-song collections — more than 16,000 songs. Bartok made fairly straightforward arrangements of some of those tunes, while sometimes just the spirit of the music made its way into his own pieces.

(Getty Music)

When the members of the Takacs Quartet and Muzsikas combine for a concert, they delight in making clear the connections between Bartok's own music and his folk-music obsessions. For example, they alternate movements from some of Bartok's best-known pieces (Romanian Folk Dances, String Quartet No. 4) with the real village dances he collected in the field — both the actual old scratchy records and their own live versions thereof.

The Quartet, and Sebestyen, does a convincing bagpipe imitation, and one never knows when Muzsikas might suddenly break into a bear dance from the remote region of Gyimes.

The concert is a remarkable intersection of sounds, giving the listener a toe-tapping glimpse into the mind of a great composer and the rural cultures that inspired him.