I never get tired of Bela Bartok. From the early Richard Strauss / Debussy inspired works to the third pianoconcerto and violaconcerto: an intelligent, serious, masterly oeuvre.
The Cantata Profana can move me very deeply.
String quartet nr 4 is another challenging and always gripping work. Facehugger, I'll see if I can find on Youtube Rosas choreography of this quartet. it was entirely shot in Ghent University's Booktower - a late (1933) work of Henry Van de Velde.
From Rosas website :
In 1986 De Keersmaeker presented us with Bartók / Aantekeningen. It was her first piece to be based on a score by one of the great masters of modern classical music. Bela Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet provided the basis for the entire production, both structurally and emotionally. The composition consists of five parts whose arrangement one might define thus: A B C B_ A_, as if the mid-section C were enclosed by a large circle (A A_) and a smaller one (B B_). The performance adopts this structure too, but in addition to the choreography based on Bartók’s music, there are also De Keersmaeker’s aantekeningen (annotations). They comprise movements carried out in silence, additions in the form of text (from Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade and Georg Büchner’s Lenz), fragments of film of children playing and car crashes, and miscellaneous sound material (Bulgarian folk singing, speeches by Lenin, Russian revolutionary songs, etc.). These heterogeneous elements are bound together by an ingenious structure so that the performance by no means appears as an assembly of separate fragments.
The four dancers act like naughty little girls; while at the same time there is an interplay as between chamber musicians in a string quartet. The parts are played by Fumiyo Ikeda, Nadine Ganase, Roxane Huilmand and, in alternation, Johanne Saunier and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. So, in this piece the choreographer takes a step back from her own work for the first time, enabling her to view it from the outside. The emotions that dominate the performance fluctuate between dissonance (also a major theme in Bartók’s music) and aggression on the one hand and melancholy and purity on the other. And yet it comes across as significantly less heavy than Elena’s Aria, mainly because the whole piece is partly informed by a girlish humour and sensuality.
