Bartok - Piano Music

The last couple of days I spent with piano music by Bela Bartok. In a way it seems natural to transition from Kodaly to Bartok who were major, contemporaneous figures in Hungarian musical life, and beyond. Both spent a considerable share of their time on ethnomusicological pursuits. Personally they were close too, Kodaly being the only one whose advice Bartok regularly took in compositional matters. Nevertheless, despite this close association I find their music to inhabit quite different worlds with Bartok offering formally, harmonically and texturally an altogether tougher, colder and more sophisticated musical universe which consequently asks for a greater commitment from the listener.

I have surprisingly little piano music of Bartok in my collection. There is a recently acquired Philips LP with the young Stephen Bishop (in 1969) playing Book VI from Mikrokosmos, the suite Out of Doors and the miniature Sonatine. And then I have one CD with Volume I from the complete traversal by Zoltan Kocsis. This contains the 14 Bagatelles, a collection of Hungarian and Romanian dances, two Elegies and also the Sonatina.

Interestingly this small collection draws from different periods in Bartok's creative life, giving a good idea of his stylistic evolution. The 14 Bagatelles, Op. 6 come first. They were composed in 1908 as a first attempt to integrate his encounter with Eastern European folk music and with the work of Debussy. I find it a very rewarding work - substantial, varied, harmonically adventurous and offering that peculiar mixture of folksiness and abstraction which to my mind seems to have largely eluded Kodaly (making an exception, perhaps, for his solo cello sonata).

Out of Doors stems from the 'piano year' 1926 and shows Bartok at his most expressionistic. The two outer movements - With Drums and Pipes and The Chase - are violently percussive, stunning compositions. There is also a very typical, haunting night music which evokes roughly contemporaneous avant garde experiments of Henry Cowell. I listened to Cowell's Aeolian Harp and Bartok's Night Music in immediate succession and with different technical means they indeed invoke similar sound worlds.

The later books of Mikrokosmos date from the 1930s and offer a purer, more technical and abstract fusion of Eastern and Western elements (Bach's counterpoint, Beethoven's progressive form and Debussy's harmony).

Both recordings offer very satisfying listening experiences, although I must say the Kocsis is in a class of its own, both as an interpretation as a recording. The latter is exceptionally rich and lifelike (taped in the Friedrich Ebert Hall in Hamburg by Kees de Visser). Kocsis' interpretations seems to have something inevitable striking the right balance between a fiery, masculine kind of virtuosity, and a cool detachment. Meanwhile I ordered the 8-CD bargain box with Kocsis' Bartok recordings.