United States Bartók, Ravel, Brahms, ‘Wildest Dreams’: Balourdet Quartet (Angela Bae, Justin DeFilippis [violins], Benjamin Zannoni [viola], Russell Houston [cello]). Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, New York, 10.12.2025. (ES-S)
Bartók – String Quartet No.3
Ravel – String Quartet in F major
Brahms – String Quartet No.3 in B-flat major, Op.67
Formed in 2018, the Balourdet Quartet has amassed in just a few years an impressive set of distinctions – most recently an Avery Fisher Career Grant and Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award – confirming its rapidly rising profile. Their ‘Wildest Dreams’ program at Weill Recital Hall, framed by the players’ reflection on ‘whether or not music exists in a specific time and place or completely in the realm of creative fantasy’, offered New York listeners an introduction to the ensemble’s hallmark clarity of gesture, rhythmic alertness and finely calibrated balance.
With the works arranged in reverse chronological order, the players delved with great enthusiasm into Bartók’s Quartet No.3, revealing its kaleidoscope of rhythms, colors and sound effects obtained with unconventional techniques. The glassy timbre drawn close to the bridge, the abrupt glissandos and tightly snapped pizzicatos were not treated as mere odd gestures but as integral strands in the score’s dense and highly wrought argument. At the same time, the intricacies of the work’s unusual design, with its four seamlessly connected sections, were articulated with notable clarity: the return of the opening material in the third segment emerged as a deliberately reconfigured counterpart to its earlier form, while the coda, after its hesitant opening gestures, aligned itself unmistakably with the folk-inflected dance that drives the variations. The Stravinskian harmonic jolts and Bergian atonal experiments that shape one of Bartók’s most daring incursions into modernism were brought out with conviction yet without letting the coloristic extremes distort the underlying motivic logic. Perhaps most impressively, they revealed how Eastern European, particularly Hungarian, folkloric reminiscences, which crisscross Bartók’s oeuvre, are here transfigured into contrapuntal textures. Many of these details can easily be obscured in the work’s density, but here they emerged with uncommon coherence, resulting in a performance that balanced volatility with structural insight and arguably proved the most fully realized interpretation of the evening.
If Bartók offered the evening’s most probing statement, Ravel’s Quartet in F brought the players into a different sound world, one in which clarity of line and finely judged color matter as much as expressive warmth. The Balourdet leaned into the work’s classical-inspired backbone from the outset: the opening Allegro moderato unfolded with a supple melodic line and a firmness of pulse that kept its très doux marking from drifting into languor, while allowing the unmistakable shadow of Debussy’s quartet to hover faintly without becoming predominant. Their tone remained slender rather than voluptuous, allowing the modal inflections and harmonic sidesteps to register with a certain objectivity.
The ensuing Assez vif, with its famously agile pizzicatos, benefited from rhythmic precision that suggested less a Spanish-guitar pastiche than a study in buoyant articulation; when the bows returned, the transition felt natural. In the Très lent, the ensemble kept the textures light, shaping the movement as a sequence of suspended reflections, its reminiscences of the first movement handled with disarming restraint. The finale’s quick shifts between five-beat and three-beat groupings were dispatched with airy decisiveness, the lines remaining agile and the sonorities unforced. If the reading favored structural clarity over sensual abandon, it nevertheless illuminated aspects of Ravel’s writing that are often blurred by overly atmospheric reading.
After the intermission, Angela Bae replaced Justin DeFilippis – who continued to provide knowledgeable and charming introductory remarks from the microphone – in the first chair for Brahms’s Quartet No.3. Her presence subtly recalibrated the ensemble’s interpretative profile. Where the Ravel had favored a slender, delicately contoured sonority, the Brahms unfolded with a more rooted lyricism, the quartet breathing as a single, malleable organism. From the first bars, the kinship with Mozart’s ‘Hunt’ Quartet flickered through the Vivace – not as quotation, but as a shared atmosphere, a sense of open air and quickening pulse – gently inflected here by Brahms’s more intricate rhythmic weave. His propensity for the interplay of duple and triple impulses, gently brushing against each other, was articulated with a lightness that kept the movement’s good-natured character intact without underplaying its structural intricacy.
The Andante, by contrast, unfolded as a Mendelssohnian Lied ohne Worte, the harmonic shading handled with notable warmth and the phrasing unfolding in long, unforced arcs. In the Agitato, the muted violins and cello created a soft, unsettled halo around Benjamin Zannoni’s viola line, which rose with plaintive clarity. The finale’s variations revealed the subtle connection between the thematic material of the first and last movements. The players traced these echoes with a suppleness that avoided any sense of pedantry, allowing Brahms’s architecture to bloom into an understated but unmistakably affirmative close.
Heard together, the three quartets revealed an unexpected affinity beneath their stylistic contrasts: each, in its own idiom, circles back to the thematic substance of its opening movement. Bartók compresses and distorts it, Ravel lets it reappear as a dreamlike echo and Brahms rebuilds it as the structural engine of his finale. This shared preoccupation with cyclical return offered its own answer to the program’s question: whether grounded in recollection or carried by imagination, each work shaped a world where memory and transformation coexist.
Edward Sava-Segal