Tesla Quartet returns to Lyrica Chamber Music series

By Mike Tschappat

Unrequited love is a theme as old as music itself and runs like a thread through some of the most inspired compositions. Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was not immune to the vagaries of romance, as can be heard in his First String Quartet.

And who better to plumb those emotive depths than the Tesla Quartet. Those who attended their exhilarating 2019 Lyrica Chamber Music concert must surely have been hoping for an opportunity to hear them again. And that will happen on Sunday, Feb. 28, at 5 p.m. when Lyrica will present the Tesla Quartet in a virtual concert on YouTube.

The concert is presented with the support of Morris Arts which seeks to build community through the arts.

The all Bartok program will include the First String Quartet and the Romanian Folk Dances. The Tesla musicians playing those pieces will be violinists Ross Snyder and Michelle Lie, violist Edwin Kaplan (brother of Lyrica co-artistic director David Kaplan) and cellist Serafim Smigelskiy.

Bartok fell in love with violinist Stefi Geyer, but was not loved in return. He suppressed for many years a violin concerto he wrote for her.

“Bartok was devastated that Geyer did not return his affections, so much so that he stopped composing for a long time,” Snyder said. “His First String Quartet was one of the first pieces he wrote upon returning to composition. You can hear this sadness clearly in the first movement, which Bartok described as a ‘funeral dirge.’ Ironically, the melody that opens the movement is borrowed from a theme in the Violin Concerto that was originally meant to depict Geyer's energetic and upbeat personality. This transformation can be seen as Bartok's coming to terms with the death of this love.”

After that funeral dirge, though, Bartok gathers himself and the last two movements reflect a more positive outlook.

Bartok’s interest in folk music shows itself most obviously in the Romanian Folk Dances, but it surfaces occasionally in the First String Quartet as well.

“Bartok had begun researching and collecting peasant folk music from the Hungarian countryside during the first decade of the 20th century, and some of that influence can be heard in the First Quartet, but not to the extent that it is in the later quartets,” Snyder said. “The middle of the first movement contains a parlando viola melody that can be compared to the Hungarian sirató, a lamenting song. The finale contains the most obvious folk music influences, particularly in the accentuation of the first of a group of notes in a melody, a style that mimics the Hungarian language.”

As COVID-19 cast its shadow over live performances in 2020, the Tesla Quartet turned its attention to the music of Bartok.

“Because we had all of our touring put on hold because of the pandemic, we found ourselves with a lot more time on our hands,” Snyder said. “We decided to take advantage of this downtime to tackle the complete Bartok cycle. It's brilliant, imaginative, challenging music that we just really love playing. We had already performed Nos. 3, 4 and 6, so it was the perfect opportunity to add the rest to our repertoire and get a sense of the development of Bartok's musical style over a 30-year period. We'll be presenting an in-depth, six-week exploration of all of the quartets online this spring, with engaging activities like open rehearsals and informative discussions with Bartok experts over Zoom. So this program is a little taste of what's to come.”

The Tesla Quartet has adapted to playing for a virtual audience they can’t see, one that may be miles away, even continents away.

“We have done a mix of live and prerecorded virtual concerts over the past year,” Snyder said. “It's a strange experience to set up microphones and then play to an ostensibly empty living room. There's a weird mixture of mindsets going on, with the ‘perfectionist’ mentality that accompanies the presence of recording equipment clashing with a desire to create the same type of spontaneous and fresh atmosphere of a normal live concert.”

The quartet has also embraced new technology called Augmented Reality that places the performers in a 360-degree environment on the home stages of presenters around the world.

The Tesla Quartet is also showing how music doesn’t need to stagnate during the pandemic. For its Alternating Currents project, it commissioned 12 short works for string quartet.

“The response to this project has been overwhelmingly supportive,” Snyder said. “We were grateful to be able to help commission composers to create new music in a time when concerts and premieres were all being canceled. We were blown away by the creativity and eagerness of all of the composers who participated. We were glad for the opportunity to continue to engage with our audience online while we couldn't travel for concerts, and I think people really appreciated the fact that creativity could still be cultivated and shared during a difficult time. We made some great connections with these composers, and I'm sure we'll be commissioning and premiering more of their music in the future.”

The results can be heard and seen on Tesla’s Web site: www.teslaquartet.com. Each video features a performance of the work followed by an interview by one of the Tesla musicians with the composer.

Sunday’s concert can be seen on Lyrica’s YouTube channel. The concert is free, but Lyrica welcomes donations which go toward supporting this concert series. Suggested donation amount is $30.

For more information about Lyrica Chamber Music, visit www.lyricachambermusic.org or call 973-309-1668.