Bartok - The Miraculous Mandarin

The last couple of weeks I have had precious little time to listen to music. I have traveled abroad, mostly on short trips, leaving the Sony player at home.  And work days have been quite long with hardly any opportunity to switch off. So by last Sunday I started to feel quite starved of auditory input.

Meanwhile, I have been conducting this little experiment of keeping a listening diary for a while and my assessment of the experience is very positive. There is something paradoxical about the wish to spend more time documenting listening experiences when professional and other obligations leave so little time for relaxation. But maybe unconsciously it is exactly the lack of time and concomitant pressures that lead me to do this. When the going gets tough I need to replenish myself. Music in its most basic impact is energy. And through this diary I have clearly experienced how rewarding and nourishing it is to attend in a more disciplined way to the listening experience. Also I have the feeling now that I'm really 'in' the music of Bartok. It's not an issue of just 'liking' it anymore. Reading up on the music and life of Bartok has been very stimulating too. I'm certainly happy to have the Cambridge Companion at my disposal which is the most complete and thorough study available.

The only piece I have been able to really listen to is The Miraculous Mandarin. No, not true! Before I left on my trip to France, almost two weeks ago, I had sampled a movement from the Concerto for Orchestra, the 'Giuco delle coppie', by Fischer's Budapest Festival Orchestra. Right in the middle of that movement, after first round of five sections devoted to pairs of instruments (bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes, muted trumpets) there is a wonderful chorale-like passage in the brass (tuba and trombone), childlike in its pentatonic naiveté. (From a 1959 Reclams Konzertführer I picked up in a second-hand bookshop: "Urplötzlich dann - über synkopischen Rhythmen des Schlagzeugs - in majestätisch harmonisiertem Blechsatz ein profunder Choral, ernst, klar, brucknerisch.") The BFO musicians play this most deeply-felt and beautifully. I have not been able to get that passage out of my head for almost a week.

The Mandarin, then. I am not finished with it yet. I listened to three different versions: the Fischer/BFO (Philips, 1997; for which they got a Gramophone Award), the Abbado/LSO (DGG, 1982) and the Dorati/BBC SO (Mercury Living Presence, 1964). All of them are most excellent. It would be hard to choose amongst them. Abbado offers the most brutal view (in a cold, biting sound), Fischer the most symphonic (in a transparant but pleasingly grainy sound) and Dorati the most graphically descriptive (in a very meaty analog recording). No doubt the pantomime is a tremendous piece of symphonic writing. But it is a work that is maybe easier to admire than to truly love. It has a unique form and aural signature. Even in Bartok's oeuvre I feel it stands apart. It offers an odd mixture of the urbane, the cartoonish, the primitive and the romantic. A hybrid of Tom and Jerry and Tristan, as it were. When I listen to it, I am thinking of Berg and Gershwin at the same time. To be continued.