254. New Directions

Works for string quartet by Bartók and Webern performed by the Omer Quartet on November 27, 2016.

• Bartók: String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7
• Webern: Six bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9

In this podcast, we’ll follow two 20th century composers on their quest for new directions and inspirations, in a musical landscape increasingly reaching beyond traditional ideas about form and tonality.

We begin with Béla Bartók’s First String Quartet, his Opus 7, a three-movement work. It begins quite somber, but the mood gradually brightens, and by the last movement, it has begun to exhibit some of the Hungarian folk color that became such a unique and defining part of Bartók’s voice as a composer.

After the Bartók, we’ll hear a brief work, written around the same time, but by a composer with a very different musical vocabulary. Like the Bartók work, Webern’s Six Bagatelles for String Quartet were a relatively early composition, Webern’s Opus 9, and the composer was still finding his voice, and his way of working within the atonal system that he and his teacher Schoenberg were developing.

We’ll hear both pieces performed by the skilled musicians of the Omer Quartet, an ensemble formed at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and currently in residence at Boston’s New England Conservatory.