Bartok

Bartók’s Dance Suite: Celebrating the Sounds of the Countryside

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For several years, beginning in the summer of 1906, the young Béla Bartók traveled to remote corners of the Hungarian countryside to document age-old folk music with the aid of the phonograph. Eventually, his travels extended to villages in Slovakia, Transylvania, and Bulgaria, and resulted in the transcription of over a thousand folk songs. Throughout the project, Bartók was assisted by his compatriot, Zoltán Kodály. The pentatonic harmony which ran through ancient …

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Remembering Seiji Ozawa

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Seiji Ozawa, the internationally renowned Japanese conductor, passed away in Tokyo last week (February 6, 2024) as a result of heart failure. He was 88. Ozawa’s 29-year tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra began in 1973. Prior to the appointment, he served as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1965-1969) and the San Francisco Symphony (1970-1977). In 1984, he founded the Saito Kinen Orchestra in Matsumoto, Japan. In …

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Bartók’s Allegro Barbaro: Zoltán Kocsis 

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In 1908, the young Béla Bartók, along with his compatriot, Zoltán Kodály, traveled to remote corners of the Hungarian countryside to document the peasant folk music of the Magyars. This is the ethnic group which occupied the region between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains between the eighth and fifth centuries B.C. before migrating west to form present-day Hungary. The colorful inflections of this music, as well as the jagged, irregular …

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Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle”: Entering Terrifying Psychological Recesses

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Béla Bartók’s symbolist opera in one act, Bluebeard’s Castle, begins with a spoken prologue which asks, “Where is the stage, outside us or within us?” What follows is a chilling psychological horror story, based on an account of a French fairy tale by Charles Perrault. The Gothic drama, set in a gloomy castle with seven locked doors, involves only two characters, the mysterious Duke Bluebeard and his young wife, Judith. Here is …

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Bartók’s Viola Concerto: An Unfinished Epilogue

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Béla Bartók was destitute and suffering from the terminal stages of leukemia when, in the winter of 1944, he was commissioned by William Primrose to write a Viola Concerto. Primrose, one of the twentieth century’s greatest violists, insisted that Bartók should not “feel in any way proscribed by the apparent technical limitations of the instrument.” Dividing his time between a summer cabin in Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondack region and a small …

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Adventures in Fourths: Music of Debussy, Bartók, and Gershwin

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The Greek name for the interval of the perfect fourth was diatessaron. Translating as “across four,” it is a word which brings to mind Pythagorean harmonic ratios. Wide open sonorities that suggest neither major nor minor, perfect fourths and fifths became prevalent in the early medieval polyphony of composers such as Léonin and Pérotin. In the piano pieces below, we hear twentieth century composers exploiting the perfect fourth for purely expressive reasons. Here are three …

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Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto: Brilliance, Structure and Symmetry

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Regarding his first two piano concertos, Béla Bartók wrote, I consider my First Piano Concerto a good composition, although its structure is a bit – indeed one might say very — difficult for both audience and orchestra. That is why a few years later…I composed the Piano Concerto No. 2 with fewer difficulties for the orchestra and more pleasing in its thematic material…Most of the themes in the piece are more popular and …

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