Bela Bartok (1881-1945) First Rhapsody (Folk Dances) Second Rhapsody (Folk Dances) Andante (1902) Piano Quintet (1903-4) The Hungarian composer Bela Bartok...
Bela Bartok (1881-1945)
First Rhapsody (Folk Dances)
Second Rhapsody (Folk Dances)
Andante (1902)
Piano Quintet (1903-4)
The Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was born in 1881 in an area that now
forms part of Romania. His father, director of an agricultural college, was a
keen amateur musician, while it was from his mother that he received his early
piano lessons. The death of his father in 18891ed to a less settled existence,
as his mother resumed work as a teacher, eventually settling in the Slovak
capital of Bratislava (the Hungarian Pozsony), where Bartok passed his early
adolescence, counting among his school-fellows the composer Erno Dohnanyi.
Offered the chance of musical training in Vienna, like Dohnanyi he chose
instead Budapest, where he won a considerable reputation as a pianist, being
appointed to the teaching staff of the Academy of Music in 1907. At the same
time he developed a deep interest, shared with his compatriot Zoltan Kodaly,
in the folk-music of his own and adjacent countries, later extended as far as
Anatolia, where he collaborated in research with the Turkish composer Adnan
Saygan.
As a composer Bartok found acceptance much more difficult, particularly in
his own country, which was, in any case, beset by political troubles, when the
brief post-war left-wing government of Bela Kun was replaced by the reactionary
regime of Admiral Horthy. Meanwhile his reputation abroad grew, particularly
among those with an interest in contemporary music, and his success both as a
pianist and as a composer, coupled with dissatisfaction at the growing
association between the Horthy government and National Socialist Germany, led
him in 1940 to emigrate to the United States of America.
In his last years, after briefly held teaching appointments at Columbia and
Harvard, Bartok suffered from increasing ill-health, and from poverty which the
conditions of exile in war-time could do nothing to alleviate. He died in
straitened circumstances in 1945, leaving a new Viola Concerto incomplete
and a Third Piano Concerto more nearly finished. The years in America,
whatever difficulties they brought, also gave rise to other important
compositions, including the Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the
Koussevitzky Foundation, a Sonata for Solo Violin for Yehudi Menuhin and,
in the year before he left Hungary, Contrasts, for Szigeti and Benny
Goodman.
The two Rhapsodies, originally for violin and piano, were both written
in 1928, the year of Bartok's Fourth Quartet. Both Rhapsodies appeared
in versions for solo violin and orchestra, possibly the composer's final
intention, and in versions for violin, viola and cello, with the first also in a
version in which the solo cello replaces the solo violin. The orchestral version
of the First Rhapsody, modestly scored, includes a cimbalom, for the
first and only time in his compositions. Both works are in two movements, lassú
followed by friss, as in the standard Hungarian dances, the verbunkos,
or recruiting-dance, and the csardas.
The lassú of the First Rhapsody starts with a melody that is
initially based on the ascending scale in the Lydian mode. A second section is
dominated by the characteristic short-long rhythm also familiar in traditional
Scottish music. The movement ends with the return of the first material and a
closing reference to the second. The friss, after a brief introduction,
turns to a melody that may seem all too familiar to American listeners. The
second section, with its variations of speed, moves on to music of greater
excitement, finally slowing to a reminiscence of the lassú and a brief
cadenza. The work is dedicated to Joseph Szigeti.
Both Rhapsodies were subject to much revision by the composer, the Second
Rhapsody notably in 1945. Dedicated to Zoltcln Szekely, the opening lassú
starts with a characteristic melody in D minor that re-appears twice, first
in a higher register, with harmonically contradictory accompaniment, and finally
in conjunction with another theme that had appeared in the second episode of
what is in fact a rondo. Characteristic rhythmic accompaniment opens the friss,
introducing the modal first melody. A second section, marked Molto moderato,
pesante, leads to the increasing excitement expected of the dance, before an
Allegro non troppo and music that continues to use varied and innovative
technical, harmonic and rhythmic devices.
The Andante of 1902 and the Piano Quintet written in 1903 and
1904 are works of a very different kind. In the first of these the influence of
Richard Strauss can be detected. Bartok had heard in 1902 the first Budapest
performance of Also Sprach Zarathustra, a work that had a profound effect
on him and led him to the study of other Strauss scores and to the transcription
for piano of Ein Heldenleben. The Quintet was completed in
Gerlicepuszta in the Gomor district in July 1904. The following month Bartok
travelled to Bayreuth to hear Parsifal. In October he gave the first
performance of the Quintet in Vienna with the Frill Quartet and the
following year took it with him to Paris for the Prix Rubinstein. There,
however, the work was not heard, while the Violin Sonata of 1903 and the
piano Rhapsody, Opus 1, failed to impress a generally conservative jury,
which included the violinist Leopold Auer from St Petersburg. The Quintet, its
movements thematically linked in a way that suggests the influence of Liszt,
follows the example of Dohnanyi and is romantic in tone, with suggestions of
Brahms and Richard Strauss in the writing. The last two movements in particular
have a distinctly Hungarian flavour, a counterpart of the traditional lassú
and friss. Bartok did not publish the work but played it on later
occasions and took it with him to the United States. It remains of more than
historical interest and marks, as the composer seems to have seen it, the end of
his apprenticeship as a composer. In November 1904 he completed his piano Rhapsody,
numbered Opus 1.
Jeno Jando
The Hungarian pianist Jeno Jando has won a number of piano competitions in
Hungary and abroad, including first prize in the 1973 Hungarian Piano Concours
and a first prize in the chamber music category at the Sydney International
Piano Competition in 1977. He has recorded for Naxos all the piano concertos and
sonatas of Mozart. Other recordings for the Naxos label include the concertos of
Grieg and Schumann as well as Rachmaninov's Second Concerto and Paganini
Rhapsody and Beethoven's complete piano sonatas.
Gyorgy Pauk
Gyorgy Pauk was born in Budapest in 1936 and had his first violin lessons at
the age of five. He studied at the Franz Liszt Academy and made his orchestral
debut at the age of fourteen and in the 1950s won the Paganini Competition in
Genoa, the Munich Sonata Competition, with the pianist Peter Frankl, and the
Long-Thibaud Competition in Paris. He made his London Festival Hall debut in
1961, settling in England, his base thereafter for a distinguished international
career. In addition to his command of standard solo violin repertoire Gyorgy
Pauk is known for his championship of contemporary music, with first
performances of works by Lutoslawski, Penderecki, Schnittke and Maxwell Davies,
and for his perceptive and committed performance of the music of Bela Bartok.
He plays the 1714 Massart Stradivarius.
Kodaly Quartet
The members of the Kodaly Quartet were trained at the Budapest Ferenc Liszt
Academy, and three of them, the second violinist Tamas Szabo, viola- player
Gabor Fias and cellist Janos Devich, were formerly in the Sebestyen Quartet,
which was awarded the jury's special diploma at the 1966 Geneva International
Quartet Competition and won first prize at the 1968 Leo Weiner Quartet
Competition in Budapest. Since 1970, with the violinist Attila Falvay, the
quartet has been known as the Kodaly Quartet, a title adopted with the approval
of the Hungarian Ministry of Culture and Education. The Kodaly Quartet has
given concerts throughout Europe, in the then Soviet Union and in Japan, in
addition to regular appearances in Hungary both in the concert hall and on
television and has made for Naxos highly acclaimed recordings of string quartets
by Ravel, Debussy, Haydn and schubert.