Including Béla Bartók in a concert designed as a crowd pleaser would seem counter-intuitive, but it worked perfectly for the DaPonte String Quartet’s benefit for the Walpole Meeting House on Sept. 7.

Violinists Lydia Forbes and Ferdinand Liva played 13 of Bartók’s 44 Duos for Violin (Sz. 98) just after intermission, and the audience response – laughter, surprise and inappropriate applause – indicated unreserved delight.

The Duos, musically, are the best works of their kind since Johann Sebastian Bach’s two-part inventions, but they are not for musicologists. Based on reconstructions of the best of some 200,000 works of Central European folk-music collected by the composer, they are exceedingly strange in harmony and counterpoint, but universal in their appeal,

Several of the 13 selections dealt with harvest themes, as befits the “Sounds of Autumn” theme of the DaPonte quartet’s fall programs, but there was also music for weddings, dances, funerals and bagpipes. An un-lullaby-like cradle song seemed, in Forbes’ view, to depict a nurse trying to soothe an irritable baby.

Bagpipe imitations, intricate counterpoint in dissonant voices, rapid pizzicato and the like make these intricate works to play, but the violinists brought out all the humor, imagery and emotion of the short pieces, without drawing attention to their technical difficulties.

The performance made one long to buy a recording of the entire set, but it is doubtful that one could find the same combination of virtuosity and the superb acoustics of the 1792 meeting house.

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Sunday’s program began with the String Quartet in A-minor (Op. 13) by Felix Mendelssohn, written when the composer was a teenager undergoing what was then known as a rest cure after the failure of his first opera. It could be subtitled “Beethoven Meets Rossini,” for its combination of operatic flourishes with idiosyncrasies from Beethoven’s late quartets.

Concert-goers are advised to sit on their hands, since the young Mendelssohn indulges himself with so many false cadences that one never knows when the last movement is going to end.

The DaPonte, and the intimate acoustics, made the entire Mendelssohn quartet sound better than it is.

The evening ended with a fine performance of Franz Joseph Haydn’s second most popular quartet, the Quartet in D Major, Op. 64, No. 3 (“The Lark”). (The most popular is “Emperor.”)

The DaPonte experimented with making the trio of the minuet movement into a lament, along the lines of that aria from Henry Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas.”

It worked quite well, as a contrast to the cheerful lyricism of the rest of the work.

“Sounds of Autumn” can be heard again at the Wells Reserve at Laudholm at 3 p.m. Oct. 12.

Christopher Hyde’s Classical Beat column appears in the Maine Sunday Telegram. He can be reached at:

classbeat@netscape.net


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