Bartók
Piano Works Zoltán Kocsis • András Schiff • Béla Bartók
CD 1 1. Allegro barbaro, Sz. 49.............................................................................. 2’37
16. RUMANIAN FOLK DANCES, Sz. 56................................................................... 4’42 Index: 1. Der Tanz mit der Stabe 2. Braul 3. Der Stampfer 4. Tanz aus Butschem 5. Rumanian Polka 6. Schnell Tanz
3 RONDOS ON FOLK TUNES, Sz. 84 2. Andante 3’06 3. Vivacissimo........................................................................................................... 2’29 4. Allegro molto........................................................................................................ 2’43
17. 15 HUNGARIAN PEASANT SONGS, Sz. 71.................................................... 12’45 Index: 1. Rubato 2. Andante 3. Poco rubato 4. Andante 5. Scherzo 6. Ballade 7. Alte Tanzweisen 8. Allegro 9. Allegretto 10. L’istesso tempo 11. Assai moderato 12. Allegretto 13. Poco piu vivo 14. Allegro 15. Allegro
THREE HUNGARIAN FOLK TUNES, Sz. 66 5. Andante tranquillo rubato.................................................................................... 0’56 6. Allegro non troppo un poco rubato...................................................................... 1’04 7. Maestoso.............................................................................................................. 1’42
SUITE, Op. 14, Sz. 62 8. Allegretto.............................................................................................................. 1’48 9. Scherzo................................................................................................................. 1’49 10. Allegro molto........................................................................................................ 2’09 11. Sostenuto............................................................................................................. 3’01 PIANO SONATA, Sz. 80 12. Allegro moderato................................................................................................. 4’35 13. Sostenuto e pesante............................................................................................. 4’12 14. Allegro molto........................................................................................................ 3’22 15. DANCE SUITE, Sz. 77....................................................................................... 16’46 Index: 1. Moderato 2. Allegro molto 3. Allegro vivace 4. Molto tranquillo 5. Comodo 6. Finale, allegro 2
Total time:....................................................................................................... 70’11
Zoltán Kocsis piano (1-14) András Schiff piano (15-17)
CD 2 MIKROKOSMOS, excerpts 1. No. 124 Staccato........................................................................................... 3’27 No. 146 Ostinato 2. No. 113 Bulgarian Rhythm............................................................................ 4’10 No. 129 Alternating thirds No. 131 Fourths No. 128 Peasant Dance 3. No. 120 Fifth chords..................................................................................... 4’19 No. 109 From the island Bali No. 128 Bagpipe 4. No. 100 In the style of a folksong................................................................. 3’36 No. 142 From the diary of a fly 3
5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
No. 140 No. 133 No. 149 No. 148 No. 108 No. 150 No. 151 No. 94 No. 152 No. 153 No. 126 No. 116 No. 130 No. 139 No. 143 No. 147 No. 144 No. 97 No. 118 No. 141 No. 136 No. 125 No. 114
Free variations Syncopation..................................................................................... 4’14 Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (2) Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (1) Wrestling......................................................................................... 3’43 Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (3) Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (4) Tale.................................................................................................. 4’03 Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (5) Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm (6) Change of time................................................................................ 3’58 Melody Village joke Merry Andrew Divided arpeggios............................................................................ 3’59 March Minor seconds, major sevenths....................................................... 4’14 Notturno.......................................................................................... 4’10 Triplets in 9/8 time Subject and reflection Whole-tone scale............................................................................. 4’21 Boating Theme and inversion
Total time: ..................................................................................................... 48’28
Béla Bartók piano
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Béla Bartók (1881-1945) Piano Works In 1904, Béla Bartók (1881-1945) had a revelation that changed the course of his musical career. As a student he had fallen under the spell of Wagner, Richard Strauss and Liszt, whose pupil Istvan Thoman taught him piano at the Budapest Conservatory and his early compositions, such as the epic symphonic poem Kossuth, glorifying the Hungarian hero of the 1848 Revolution, were cast in the late-Romantic mould. However during a stay in the country, he overheard a Transylvanian girl singing a simple folk song and realised that the indigenous music of his country was very different from the “gypsy” music to be heard in the cafes of Budapest and Vienna and romanticised by Brahms and Liszt. So he decided to “collect the finest examples of Hungarian folk music and raise them to the level of works of art”, a resolution that was furthered by his friendship with Zoltan Kodaly who in 1905 introduced Bartók to the wax cylinder phonograph as a means of recording music in the field. For the next twelve years, Bartók and his recording apparatus travelled far and wide across Hungary, Transylvania, Bulgaria Slovakia, Romania and North Africa seeking out authentic traditional music in remote villages which had remained untouched by the “modern” world. He always described this period as the happiest of his life and by 1918, despite the difficulties imposed by First World War which was to destroy the rural societies which had been his sources, he had collected over eight thousand songs and dances. However Bartok’s interest lay beyond simple collection and transcription and his work in analysing, classifying and tracing the influences and crosscurrents in traditional folk music would have earned him a considerable reputation as an ethnomusicologist even if he had not composed a note of music himself. The compositions of Bartók which are influenced by traditional music fall into three main categories. Some, like the Three Hungarian Folk Songs from the Csik District (1907), the Romanian Folk Dances (1915) and the first of the Rondos on Folk Tunes (written in 1916) are more or less faithful transcriptions of music he had recorded in the field complete with 5
their original ornamentations. In others, like the second and third Rondos, both dating from 1927, and the Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs, composed between 1914 and 1918, he uses traditional melodies and rhythms as the foundation on which to build more complex original compositions. The arrangement of the Hungarian Songs for example creates a four movement work with an opening slow movement, made up of the first four “Old Tunes”, followed by a Scherzo and slow movement, the Ballade and ending with a fast moving finale, comprising the nine “Old Dance Tunes”, whose final section does however faithfully reproduce one of his recordings of Hungarian bagpipe music. Finally there are the works which do not include any actual folk material but are heavily coloured by the various musical forms and textures Bartók had encountered on his travels. The Suite Op 14 owes much to his researches in the Biskra region of Algeria in 1912, especially its third movement whose rhythms imitate Bedouin dances, and North African, as well as Hungarian and Romanian influences appear in Dance Suite of 1925. This is actually a piano transcription of an orchestral suite commissioned in 1923 for the celebrations to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the unification of Buda and Pest (to which Kodaly and Dohnanyi also contributed ). The linking ritornello passage shows the influence of Liszt’s B minor Piano Sonata, a work which Bartók had studied intensively and to which his own Piano Sonata is also heavily indebted. It was composed in 1926 for a concert tour of the United States the following year, for which he also wrote the First Piano Concerto and the Out of Doors Suite, and is dedicated to his second wife Ditta Pasztory. Its violent pounding rhythms recall The Rite of Spring and the final movement makes extensive use of the chromatic “tone clusters”: of the American avant-garde composer Henry Cowell, in which contiguous notes are sounded together (Bartók actually sought Cowell’s permission to employ this technique in this and other works). The aggressively percussive music of this piece and the pounding rhythms and relentless forte dynamic of the more popular Allegro Barbaro of 1911 have given Bartók an unfair reputation for wild primitivism although the Allegro was itself written as a riposte to an unfavourable review describing him as one of the “jeunes barbares hongrois”. 6
CD 2 contains a rare recording of Bartók in performance, playing selections from Mikrokosmos, which he made for Columbia in 1940 just after he had arrived in the United States after fleeing Nazi-dominated Hungary. Bartók wrote the bulk of the six volumes of Mikrokosmos between 1932 and 1939 as a teaching aid for piano students and each of its 153 short sections, which are arranged in order of difficulty, address a different theoretical or technical problem. The first two volumes are dedicated to his son Peter whom he began to teach in 1933 and many were composed on the spot for use in his lessons. The last three volumes, from which Bartók made this selection, are for advanced pianists and although they retain an instructional purpose, are really full-blown recital pieces. Each section has an often self-explanatory title and many contain homages to other composers - Divided Arpeggios (143) to Debussy, Triplets in 9/7 Time (118) to Bach, and Notturno (97) to Chopin. Mikrokosmos also contains a great deal of humour, - Wrestling (108) in which the tones of a minor second fight it out, Bagpipe (138) imitating the sound of all three pipes playing at once and The Diary of a Fly (142) which contains a miniature three act drama in which the fly buzzes its way into a spiders web (Allegro) struggles desperately to escape (Agitato), and succeeds just in time (con goia). David Moncur
Recording: CD1: October 1975 Arakawa Kumin Kaikan, Japan (1-14); June 1980 Yachiyo Kaiman, Chiba, Japan (15-17) CD2: 1937/1940, London, New York Licenced from Union Square, UK (CD1) © 2012 Brilliant Classics 7
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