Bartok - Short Orchestral Works

Precious little time to listen these days. I am spending all my waking hours writing proposals. Meanwhile a 3-CD box arrived with Ivan Fischer's recordings of Bartok's orchestral works on the Philips label. These are recordings from the late 1990s, re-issued in 2006 as a Collectors' set. They quickly dropped out of the catalogue and are difficult to find today.

I just listened to the Dance Suite again and some of the shorter collections of dances. What I heard is very promising. Clearly, compared to the mid-1980s recordings of the piano concertos and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the Budapest Festival Orchestra sounds like a more homogeneous and mature ensemble. The sound is also better. The older set was taped by Hungaroton engineers whilst this has been recorded by a Dutch crew at the Italian Institute in Budapest. The Suite sounds awesome. Really a rival to the Solit which is excellent. I look forward to discovering Fischer's Mandarin and Concerto for Orchestra as soon as I have the time, likely somewhere near the end of next week. There's some travelling to be done first.