Magyar Madness!

A Sunday afternoon concert presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center packed Alice Tully Hall with a program of old and new music with a distinctly – and sometimes not so distinctly – Hungarian whiff that illustrated the pitfalls of overly varied programming.

It was an ambitious if lopsided program that buried Bartok’s challenging String Quartet no. 3 between works by Brahms and Erno Dohnányi and, in the second half featured the New York premiere of David Del Tredici’s “Magyar Madness,” a 35-minute work for string quartet and clarinet that the staunchly tonal composer wrote in 2006 for the clarinetist David Krakauer and the Orion String Quartet. The hard working Orion players are vigorous champions of new music, and formed the backbone of Sunday’s concert.

Pianists Alessio Bax and Annie-Marie McDermott kicked-off the concert with animated, frisky and sometimes seductive four-hand arrangements of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances nos. 6, 10 and 5. McDermott and Bax treated the dissonant sonorities with a breezy, fanciful way and with jarring attacks that were quirky and amusingly off-kilter.

Plopped in the middle of the concert’s first half was Bartok’s highly compressed Third String Quartet. The Orion String Quartet began with a sinewy, shrill and at times ghoulish sound with forceful attacks from the violins. A feeling of uneasy calm was established and preserved until the announcement of the dance-like melodies in the second movement. Here the musicians played with clear textures and rendered the composer’s instrumental techniques with overt care: the con legno rattling of bones and evenly-deployed pizzicato. In all, it sounded a bit antiseptic and unvaried. While the work sounded fluid in their hands, this was a tightly reined-in performance whose emotional content sounded stifled.

The final piece before intermission, Dohnányi’s Piano Quintet no. 2, seemed like a programming misstep. The lush neo-romanticism of Dohnányi’s shimmering work inhabits a different sonic universe from Bartok, this music that sighs and dances around so wistfully. While the rediscovery of lesser-known works is commendable, the quintet’s inclusion on this program detracted greatly from the power of the Bartok.

The concert again shifted gears for in the second half, which was dominated by Del Tredici’s energetic and tuneful “Magyar Madness” - a title that echoes clarinetist Krakauer’s own well-known ensemble “Klezmer Madness!”

If the Orion players were feeling fatigued, they certainly didn’t show it. In the first movement, Krakauer was in control amid the frantic swirling of the strings as he played a modulating series of sequences and plaintively sustained tones in music whose stylistic variety often sounded like mere pastiche. The fractal scales and shifting accents seemed little more than exercises.

The string writing often had a transparent texture, with some unexpected gestures like an intriguingly slow-motion flurry of pizzicato. Krakauer didn’t have much to do until the 20-minute-long finale, which began with a virtuosic rising scale that brought to mind the famous opening to Rhapsody in Blue and which was mirrored later in the movement by an equally precipitous descent. Throughout, Krakauer and the Orion players were kept equally busy with scales and arpeggios in a furious, chase-like music that competed with a tuneful Hungarian-style rondo that was nearly bludgeoned to death by repetition. The old-world melody was less convincing than the anguished klezmer-like high notes the Krakauer landed. And it was these wailing tones that rang truest, even if they seemed out of place for a wide-ranging piece that never fully explored its melodic material and rarely seemed more than an exercise in style.

It felt like a very long late afternoon for an audience that was edified through popular and challenging repertory standards, a rediscovered work and a premiere – and for a concert that struggled to be more than the sum of its parts.