Bartók New Series 28.

Reviews

Works for Piano Solo (5)

	Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs op.20 (1920, BB 83, Sz 74)
1	I. Molto moderato	1'20"
2	II. Molto capriccioso	0'58"
3	III. Lento, rubato	2'20"
4	IV. Allegretto scherzando	0'40"
5	V. Allegro molto	0'48"
6	VI. Allegro moderato, molto capriccioso	1'22"
7	VII. Sostenuto, rubato	1'47"
8	VIII. Allegro	1'45"

	(Recorded: 1980)

	Dance Suite for Piano (1923, for piano: 1925, BB 86b, Sz 77)
9	I. Moderato	3'26"
10	II. Allegro molto	2'01"
11	III. Allegro vivace	2'49"
12	IV. Molto tranquillo	2'10"
13	V. Comodo	0'58"
14	VI. Finale, Allegro	3'47"

	(Recorded: 1999)

	Sonata for Piano
	(1926, BB 88, Sz 80)

15	I. Allegro moderato	4'24"
16	II. Sostenuto e pesante	4'35"
17	III. Allegro molto	3'43"
	(Recorded: 1996)

	Outdoors, Five Piano Pieces (1926, BB 89, Sz 81)
18	I. With Drums and Pipes (Pesante)	1'43"
19	II. Barcarolla	2'17"
20	III. Musettes	2'34"
21	IV. The Night's Music (Lento)	4'38"
22	V. The Chase (Presto)	2'00"

	(Recorded: 1996)


	Nine Little Piano Pieces (1926, BB 90, Sz 82) Volume 1: Four Dialogues
23	I. Moderato	1'38"

24	II. Andante	1'18"
25	III. Lento	1'42"
26	IV. Allegro vivace	0'54"
	Volume 2

27	V. Menuetto	1'55"
28	VI. Air	1'02"
29	VII. Marcia delle bestie	2'02"
30	VIII. Tambourine	1'04"
	Volume 3
31	IX. Preludio – All'Ungherese	3'32"

	(Recorded: 1996)


	Petite Suite (1936, BB 113, Sz 105)
32	Slow Tune	2'05"

33	Walachian Dance	0'47"
34	Whirling Dance	0'40"
35	Quasi Pizzicato	1'09"
36	Ruthenian Dance	0'57"

Bagpipes

(Recorded: 1996)

1'03"

Total Time: 75'49"

Zoltán Kocsis

piano

BB = László Somfai's List of Works

Sz = András Szőllősy's List of Works

Licensed from DECCA Music Group Limited, a division of Universal Music Group

In the chronological organization of solo piano works by Béla Bartók (1881–1945) this disc presents his music from the 1920s–1930s, except one major series (Mikrokosmos, see CD 29–30), and some additional pieces that appear in another context (nos. 2–3 of Three Rondos on CD 27). Undoubtedly the core of this repertoire is the sensational output of the year 1926, Bartók's so-called “piano year”: the Sonata, Outdoors, and the Nine Little Piano Pieces. This was innovative piano music partly under the impression of, and in resistance to, Stravinsky's percussive piano playing, witnessed by Bartók in Budapest (the Russian master performed his Concerto with wind instruments on 15 March 1926). Meanwhile his own first piano concerto was on his mind, the compositional process of which was unusually difficult, full of interruptions and hesitation. Another peak of the piano oeuvre is the Improvisations, Bartók's only folksong-based composition with an opus number. This disc also includes two distinguished piano transcriptions: Dance Suite based on the symphonic version, brilliant piano music that Bartók, however, never played publicly, and Petite Suite from the violin duos, which he very much favoured in the last decade of his career as a pianist.

Bartók in Switzerland

near Davos , 1927

Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, op.20

After the fall of the 1919 Commune in Hungary, Bartók asked for leave from the Liszt Academy of Music to concentrate on his work in the Museum of Ethnography, surveying and classifying the material of about 7800 Hungarian folksongs kept there, and transcribing the phonograph cylinders. This resulted in his book A magyar népdal (The Hungarian Folksong, 1924; English translation: 1931) and, as a compositional by-product, an unusual piano composition based on Hungarian peasant melodies that in his view belonged to the most beautiful examples of the old style. Incidentally he hesitated as to the appropriate title: “piano pieces” was first replaced by “impromptus” then by “improvisations”.

Opus 20 is the last opus number among Bartók's printed works. Although a folkmusic-based composition, as he wrote to his publisher: “with respect to harmony it is ... considerably freer [than the Fifteen Hungarian Peasant Songs] so that it can appear as an original work with opus number”. In later essays he characterized it as the highest class of folksong arrangement in which the folk melody is “only to be regarded as a kind of motto”. According to Bartók's own evaluation, “In my Eight Improvisations for Piano I reached, I believe, the extreme limit in adding most daring accompaniments to simple folk tunes” (Harvard Lectures 1943). The characteristic harmony of a piece is sometimes based on the opening notes of the folk melody (no.1), or on a bold combination of the melodic steps in a dissonant harmony (no.7), or inspired by the irregular scale of the tune (no.3); elsewhere the unstable third in certain folk dialects (similar to the “blue note” in jazz) gave birth to oscillating figures (no.4). Not surprisingly in the December 1920 music supplement to La revue musicale devoted to Debussy's death, along with pieces by Stravinsky, Ravel, de Falla, Satie and others, Bartók's contribution was no.7 of Improvisations, a highly original composition based on a sombre lullaby.

Ditta and Bartók in Davos

Before the world première of the cycle in Budapest (18 January 1922) Bartók decided to give the eight pieces a kind of a four-part (four-movement) form by connecting certain pieces attacca. Three such blocks start with a slow piece and end with a fast one: nos. 1–2, 3–5, and 7–8; the third quasi-movement (no.6) embodies the grotesque (the scherzo) of the set. Except for no.3, Bartók's extremely expressive own performance of the Improvisations is also available on CD. For a studio recording of nos. 1–2 and 6–8 cf. Bartók at the Piano 1920–1945. Gramophone records, piano rolls, live recordings, Hungaroton, 1991, HCD 12326–31; for a live broadcast performance of nos. 4–5 cf. Bartók Recordings from Private Collections. Bartók plays and talks 1910–1944, Hungaroton Classic, 1995, HCD 12334–37.

Dance Suite for Piano

Dance Suite is one of Bartók's popular symphonic works; in addition today it has the reputation of being probably his most brilliant solo piano piece. From the composer's point of view it was, however, just a transcription. Emil Hertzka, director of Universal Edition, suggested the idea of writing a “not too difficult” Klavierübertragung (piano transcription) from the successful score. Bartók accepted the commission and prepared the transcription in summer 1925. He knew that some passages had to be formulated in a concert-style version to prevent their sounding terribly tedious, so he added easier variants, as “ossia”. In spite of the painstaking work he invested in the piano version, on the title page Bartók stressed the original genre: “Dance Suite for orchestra / Piano transcription” and he never considered playing it publicly; after all, the symphonic version was so much superior to the reduction. On the other hand, when his former pupil György Sándor studied and premiered it in the 1940s in New York, Bartók was happy to suggest sensible cuts and idiomatic pianistic solutions to sections here and there that still resembled a short-score.

The piano transcription follows the original orchestral version faithfully, retaining the six-movement form linked together by ritornellos, with themes recurring in the Finale (a dramatic gesture clearly in deference to Beethoven's Ninth), before the final round-dance apotheosis. The narrative of Bartók's Dance Suite is of course different and had a special message in 1923, just after the Versailles Treaty dismembered the Carpathian Basin and inflamed hostile feelings among the neighbouring nations. This not only impeded Bartók's systematic folk-music collecting tours on Romanian and Slovak territories but endangered his most personal human ideals based on the brotherhood of nations. In a later discarded paragraph of a lecture in 1931 he admitted that

The thematic material of all the movements is an imitation of peasant music. The aim of the whole work was to put together a kind of idealized peasant music — you could say, an invented peasant music — in such a way that the individual movements of the work should introduce particular types of music. Peasant music of all nationalities served as a model: Hungarian, Rumanian, Slovak, and even Arabic. In fact, here and there is even a hybrid from these species. Thus, for example, the melody of the first subject of the first movement is reminiscent of primitive Arabic peasant music, whereas its rhythm is of East European folk music.

Bartók added that no.4 was fully Arabic in nature; the Ritornello and no.2 Hungarian; no.3 Hungarian and Rumanian; “the fifth has a peculiarly primitive Rumanian quality”, he stated in an article in 1944. Incidentally before the orchestration Bartók omitted a fully drafted piece, the original third movement, representing the now absent Slovak character, perhaps because it did not match up to the quality of the other movements.

Sonata for Piano

In view of the number of works composed for piano solo, it is surprising that Bartók gave the title of Sonata only once — not counting the juvenile miniature sonatas and a lengthy romantic “Sonata op.1” written when he was a 17-year-old student. Yet this should not surprise us: for Bartók, as his two violin sonatas or the Sonata for two Pianos and Percussion exemplify, the sonata both as a title and a concept postulated at least one extensive movement in sonata form, and well-designed thematic and dramatic links between the substantially long and complex movements. The majority of his solo piano pieces were, however, written when Bartók was chasing new ideas, working on a new style for which he preferred simpler forms. In such periods — most typically in 1908–1910 and 1926 — he delayed the consideration of how the increasing number of piano pieces would make up multi-movement compositions, either in a traditional cyclic form, or in less traditional suite forms, or just in loose series with appropriate titles.

Bartók at the piano

The Sonata is the first finished product of the feverish activity of summer 1926 when, searching for inspiration and ideas for his planned first piano concerto (August–November 1926), Bartók wrote down some twenty solo pieces without a firm conception of their final arrangement. Nevertheless it is significant that in addition to the general approach of building up a new percussive style for solo and concerto alike, the Sonata and the Piano Concerto no.1 were in the same key, in E. The Sonata and the pieces of Outdoors were sketched more or less in parallel in June. Other, shorter solo pieces made up the set Nine Little Piano Pieces and Bartók put aside three pieces which years later reappeared in Mikrokosmos.

All three movements of the Sonata are unique in their own way. The opening Allegro moderato is traditionally a misinterpreted piece: on the surface it is an enormous “allegro barbaro” at a steady speed, with exhausting hammering, rock-hard clashes of polymetric rhythms — thus the prototype of Bartók's neoclassicism. The contours of a sonata form, with a long exposition (half of the movement), short development and recapitulation, and a substantial coda in Più mosso tempo, are recognizable but in typical performances play a less important part. Unfortunately there is no Bartók recording of the Sonata and very few modern renditions reveal the thematic variety of this huge piece (Zoltán Kocsis was one of the first pianists who established the appropriate Bartók-like performing style of this movement). The Sostenuto e pesante second movement (in C), written in an unusually rigorous style, is a kind of lament with the instrumental depiction of bells, mourning gestures, outcries, the singing of a dirge, and emotional collapses. The Allegro molto finale returns to the more familiar Bartók. It is a monothematic rondo based on the variations of a folktune-like theme composed by Bartók (Hungarian in character but framed in the changing meter of Romanian colinda songs). The 281-measure long piece was 416 measures at a previous stage, when the prototype of the “Musettes” (no.3 of Outdoors) was still part of the finale. In this long version the full catalogue of ethnomusicological genres appeared presenting the tune as rondo episodes: the quasi vocal, peasant flute, bagpipe, and fiddle performances. Cutting out the central bagpipe scene Bartók partly sacrificed this “secret programme” for the sake of a better balance.

Plaster cast of Bartók's hand

Outdoors, five piano pieces

In contrast to the Sonata, the movements which Bartók drafted in the same feverish weeks in June 1926, Outdoors (Out Doors in earlier editions, Out of Doors in the standard literature; Bartók's German title was Im Freien) were not intended as a coherent cyclic composition which should at all costs be presented in its entirety. His own Hungarian and German wording of the title page, in addition to the indicative title, marked it as “Five piano pieces”. The composer insisted on two printed versions: one with the five movements in a single volume, and another as separate issues of the five pieces. Significantly, in his recitals Bartók preferred the selections. He played nos.1, 4, and 5 at the premiere on 8 December 1929, in Budapest. In the following years nos.1 and 4, as a pair, were his favourites, which he repeatedly played in combination with pieces from other sets. Yet the suite-form organization of the five movements with alternating tempos and characters, ending with a virtuoso finale, and even the typical key relationship of the central tones of the movements (E, G, A, G, E) cannot be overlooked.

The five titles raise an interesting point for speculation about the narrative (or hidden programme) of the individual pieces. Some, like “With Drums and Pipes” or “Musettes”, just as several titles in the Nine Little Piano Pieces also written in 1926, are reminiscent of Baroque music, more specifically Couperin. In fact in 1924 Bartók edited two slender volumes of harpsichord pieces by Couperin; in 1925 he added Les fastes de la grande et anciénne ménestrandise to the program of his recitals. But are the five movements of Outdoors genuine programme music, or at least neo-Baroque coquetry? Bartók made no comment in this regard; his hesitation about the translation of the original Hungarian titles shows that he was taciturn rather than voluble about the intended “narrative”. For instance, in case of “The Night's Music” (no.4), he submitted three German versions to Universal Edition: Klänge der Nacht, Musik der Nacht, Nächtliche Klänge. In this case, thanks to the composer's son Béla Bartók Junior, we at least have a hint: the frogs' chorus and other evocative sounds, which Bartók heard in the night in the Great Hungarian Plain where he often visited his sister, gave the inspiration. This may have been the inspiration for the short motives in the opening section of “The Night's Music”. The movement has, however, a complex form, based on the confrontation and combination of three characters obviously representing nature, the solitude of the poet (a chorale-like melody), and the people (the peasant-style dance theme), with Bartók's pessimistic outlook of life at the end.

“With Drums and Pipes” (no.1), a sensational exploitation of percussive piano writing, may have a programme, perhaps depicting a village scene: an approaching band, somebody singing a song but then drowned out by the drumming band, the piece ending with a rubato outcry. The accompanying motion of “Barcarolla” (no.2) has the veritable sway of a gondola (Bartók visited Venice in 1924 with Ditta, his second wife), yet the cantando does not echo Venetian tunes but rather the “long melody” (hora lungă) as sung in Transylvanian villages by Romanian peasants. “Musettes” (no.3), in its original form an episode of the finale of the Sonata 1926, also has a twofold meaning: it is a modern recreation of the Baroque genre piece, but at the same time a true apotheosis of the bagpipe as Bartók learned to admire it, with the wheezing and whining of the mistuned peasant instrument. “The Chase” (no.5) perhaps owes a debt to Liszt's concert study “Mazeppa” and Bartók's Mandarin chase. More importantly, this is a study in creating a feeling of inarticulateness, of almost unbearable tension by the careful design of clashes of a left-hand ostinato and the increasingly decomposed phrases of the right hand octaves.

Nine Little Piano Pieces

From the output of the hectic compositional activity in June and August 1926, in addition to the Sonata and Outdoors, Bartók put together “one volume of easier pieces”. The first and the last of the Nine Little Piano Pieces bear the note “1926. okt. 31.-ére” (For 31 Oct. 1926), i.e. for the birthday of Ditta Pásztory, his pianist wife. Incidentally the Sonata was also dedicated to Ditta (although she never played it publicly).

Some of the titles, styles, or textures may have been inspired by Bartók's renewed interest in Baroque music — Italian masters (Rossi, Della Ciaia, Zipoli, etc.) whose music he studied and transcribed in parallel to composing his own piano music in 1926, but also Domenico Scarlatti, Couperin, and Bach. Bartók arranged the nine pieces in three books. The first included “Four Dialogues”, which can be best characterized by Bartók's own words, when he spoke about the stylistic change in the year 1926: “...my work became more contrapuntal and also more simple on the whole. A greater stress of tonality is also characteristic of this time” (interview from 1941).

Nine Little Piano Pieces, no. 1,

dedicated autograph copy

The second book included four character pieces: “Menuetto”, “Air” (in fact a folksong composed by Bartók), “Marcia delle bestie” (with reference to Couperin's suites as well as Bartók's own “Bear Dance” movements), and “Tambourine” (quite sensational in Bartók's own “drumming” rendition; for his recordings of nos.6, 8 and 9 see the collection Bartók at the Piano). The last book consists of “Preludio—All'ungherese”, a quasi slow–fast rhapsody, the abstract form and the overtly Hungarian version of a Hungarian folksong he composed himself.

Petite Suite

Originally five pieces, with the addition of the second piece in 1942 in New York for a gramophone recording resulting in a six-movement suite form, these are transcriptions from nos. 28, 32, 38, 43, 16, 36 of Forty-Four Duos for two violins (1931–1932, cf. CD 16). Bartók loved his duos, the only set in which all of the important national rural music sources of his own collecting field work were included: Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, Ruthenian, and Arabic. In Petite Suite he selected and transcribed some of his favourites for his own instrument, a colourful arrangement of sad and happy, rustic and refined characters. In Europe as well as in the United States this attractive concert number, Bartók presumed, represented his ideal of folkmusic arrangement better that the old sets from the 1910s. Nos.1 and 4 (“Slow Tune” and “Quasi pizzicato”) are based on Hungarian vocal melodies, nos.2 and 3 (“Valachian” and “Whirling Dance”) on Romanian vocal and fiddler music, no.5 on a Ruthenian song from Maramureş county, whereas no.6 (“Bagpipes”) “contains motifs of the composer's own imagination and invention and intends to be — as seen from the designation — a stylized imitation of rural bagpipe music” (Bartók 1942).

László Somfai

Translated by Richard Robinson

Zoltán Kocsis (photo by Andrea Felvégi)

Recordings:

(1) Improvisations: Henry Wood Hall, London, 10-12 February 1980

(2) Dance Suite: Friedrich-Ebert-Halle, Hamburg, 21-24 August 1999

(3) Sonata, (4) Outdoors, (5) Nine Little Piano Pieces, (6) Petite Suite: Friedrich-Ebert-Halle,

Hamburg, June 1996

Recording producers & balance engineers: Volker Straus (1), Wilhelm Hellweg (3-6)

Recording producer: Wilhelm Hellweg (2)

Recording engineer: Cees Heijkoop (1), Kees de Visser (3-6)

Balance engineer: Jean Marie Geijsen (2)

Tape editor: Martin Vos (1), Jean van Vugt (3-6)

Editing facilities by Thijs Hoekstra, Polyhymnia International (2)

CD mastered by János Győri

Illustrations: Bartók Archives, Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Címlap / Cover: Bartók Londonban / Bartók in London, 1936

Cover design: Péter Nagy

Booklet editor: Rita Kaisinger

Printing editor: Marianne Szilasi

Executive producer: Péter Nádori

Publishers: Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers (1), Universal Edition A.G. Wien (2-6),

(P) 2000, 2001, 1997 Philips Classics Productions

This compilation: (P) 2008 Hungaroton Records Ltd.

CD is manufactured by Sony DADC in Austria