Bartok - Contrasts

After the expressionistic excesses of the previous week, it was refreshing to return to the relative clarity and intimacy of Bartok's chamber music. Contrasts (1938) is likely not one of his strongest works, but it is one of the chamber pieces I listened to regularly before the present listening campaign. The first two movements have a strangely laconic quality, with unremarkable, even lacklustre thematic material. The fiery final movement brings a welcome contrast indeed. Nevertheless, as a whole I find it a compelling piece. The listening pleasure is certainly enhanced by the excellent Naxos recording with Pauk on the violin, Jando on piano and Berkes on clarinet. I also listened to the historical, so-to-speak definitive recording (also on Naxos) with Bartok himself playing the piano, Benny Goodman (who commissioned the work) on clarinet, and Joseph Szigeti (who instigated Bartok to write it). The recordings date from April 1940. Honestly, I can't make much of it. The piece falls completely flat due to the poor audio quality. I'll have the modern recording any day. 

Malcolm Gillies, in the Cambridge Companion, compares three late chamber works - Divertimento, Contrasts and the Sonata for Solo Violin - and writes an interesting summary that resonates beyond these compositions. It's worth quoting: "Once we look within these large-scale structures, we find a composer obsessed with exploiting all the potential of variation techniques. In Bartok's hands, the music is forever in a state of transformation. (...) But he manages to maintain a superb sense of unity to the music through limiting the number of his themes or motifs and ensuring that, whatever processes of transformation they are subjected to, they retain their essential identity. Underlying scalar structures are liable to be expanded or contracted in whimsical ways. The various phrases of his themes rarely involve exact repetition, either rhytmically or in pitches, but take on a life of their own as soon as they have started. Bartok spins the musical texture within the divisions of his musical forms largely through relentless employment of imitative strategies, with a brief motif frequently generating five or ten bars of music through its varied reiteration in close proximity in any number of parts."