Bartok - Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

The renewed engagement with the music of Bartok continues to inspire. Today I listened a couple of times to one of his acknowledged masterpieces. First there was a 1968 LP recording by Pierre Boulez with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on CBS. It's a characteristically objective and restrained reading and I wished the Allegro movements would have had a little more fire. The vinyl was also not in top shape. Very worthwhile, however, are the cover notes by Boulez himself. His discussion of the Music and of Bartok's significance in our recent musical history is illuminating.

Then came what is considered a reference recording, with the Chicago SO under Fritz Reiner. Indeed a splendid Mercury Living Stereo recording which strikes just the right balance between at times frosty introspection and fiery engagement.

Karajan's 1970 recording struck me as less successful. I only listened to the finale but the orchestra seemed to be out of its comfort zone. Karajan presses on relentlessly in this Allegro Molto and seems to forget to let the music breath. The recording in the Grünewaldkirche in Berlin (produced by Walter Legge) is a pretty muddy affair too.

Adam Fischer with the Hungarian State SO taped Bartok's orchestral output in the Haydn-room of the Esterhazy palace. The recording sounds impossibly cavernous. Really unpalatable. Fischer's reading is very loosely woven too. I didn't listen it to the end.

I vividly remember hearing a live performance of this piece by Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra at the Concertgebouw in Brugge. I think it is worthwhile to seek out the recording he made two decades ago on the Philips label (out of the catalogue, it seems).

The listening was greatly aided by Boulez' analysis as well as by a short, rather technical but informative essay by Malcolm Gillies in The Bartok Companion (Faber & Faber, 1993). One cannot be but impressed by the lucidity but also the naturalness of the conception, by the diversity of 'issues' and tensions that Bartok is able to bring together in a coherent musical structure and the economy of means with which he resolves these problems.