Bartok - 44 Duos for Two Violins

The exploration of Bartok's oeuvre continues with a work that I hadn't heard before. What a magnificent, heartwarming ECM production this is ! I have confessed my love for this record label (if we can call it like that) before. This, once more, is a perfect package. The 44 Duos are a work that is singular in its scope, form and instrumentation. The musicianship is of the highest order, but at the same time it is also relaxed and down to earth. The recording (at ECM's familiar Kloster St Gerold in the Austrian Vorarlberg) is transparent, vivacious and set in a pleasingly resonant acoustic. Finally, the accompanying booklet is impeccably produced with an intelligent essay by Wolfgang Sandner (music editor at the FAZ) and a very evocative picture by Peter Nadas gracing the cover.

This is Bartok at his most approachable. The 44 Duos were composed in the early Thirties as a kind of pendant to his For Children for the piano. The initial purpose was didactic: a set of pieces for a German compendium of graded violin pieces. A little later this concept blossomed into the Mikrokosmos. Almost all are based on folk material, from all over the Balkans. Initially Bartok arranged them in order of difficulty but he anticipated that people would make selections of pieces for concert performance. In this recording, Andras Keller and Janos Pilz (both founding members of the Keller Quartet) have rearranged the order of the pieces so as to allow for sustained listening throughout the whole set. And this works admirably. It really is not a burden to sit through 52 minutes of music which occupies after all a relatively narrow textural bandwith. The overall impression is uplifting and cheerful but also epic, timeless. The music sounds like unbuttoned folk, yes, but in addition we hear echoes of Bach, Beethoven and, as Sandner discusses in his essay, also the grammar of New Music is brilliantly woven into the music (Malcolm Gillies makes a similar argument in The Bartok Companion). The avant garde echoes are reinforced by the two very short works from other Hungarian composers - Ligeti and Kurtag - that are complementing this recording.