Bartok - Piano Works

I returned to the Bartok recital by Claude Helffer. My first impression was confirmed. It's a fabulous recording, and likely the most compelling survey of key Bartok piano works I've come across. Helffer certainly trumps Perahia who seems to play all the notes but stays aloof to the spirit of these magnificently earthy works. The glassy digital sound doesn't help either. Kocsis puts some amazing pyrotechnics on display, and he is well recorded by the Philips crew, but his youthful exuberance leads him to gloss over some of the darker shadings. Helffer plays with a lot of panache too. There is tremendous energy and fire in the music's percussive outbursts. But everything remains impeccably controlled and clearly contoured. His colouristic palette is richer than either of his colleagues, particularly towards the more somber end of the spectrum. The piano sounds more grainy and less generic than in Kocsis' recordings.

The recital is superbly paced, chronologically sequenced and contains key milestones in Bartok's pianistic output. At 49' duration it is great pity it was not possible to add the early Bagatelles or at least the Three Studies from 1918. Anyway, it starts out with the set of Popular Romanian Dances (1915) fresh as dew. The short Suite (1916) gives already an inkling of the darker powers that will be unleashed later in the program. Helffer makes a tremendous case for the Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs from 1920. This is the time of the Mandarin, and you can hear it. I must say this is a collection that up to now I had overlooked but after hearing it from Helffer's hands I dug into the Bartok Companion to which Paul Wilson contributes an interesting essay on the pivotal role of these short pieces in the process of Bartok's compositional maturation. Out of doors strikes with full force in a savage, lugubrious reading. The Sonata (1926) is if anything even more impressive in the percussive wildness of the allegros. In the eery, rythmically and harmonically unsettling middle movement one can hear indeed how this was distilled from the even more experimental Sostenuto rubato (dedicated to the memory of Debussy) from the Improvisations.