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Seen and Heard International Concert Review

Bartok, Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra, Stephane Lemelin, Andrew
Tunis (pianos); Kenneth Simpson, Jonathan Wade (percussion), Ottawa Symphony
Orchestra/David Currie, Ottawa, January 24th 2005 (BB)

Bartok's 1937 Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion is one of the great musical
masterpieces, I have long thought, so this performance of its orchestrated version was
much anticipated.

As to this work's origin, the scarcity of appropriate venues for the Sonata apparently
prompted Bartok to orchestrate it in hopes of larger audiences. He and his wife Ditta
Pasztory played the resulting Concerto for Two Pianos, Percussion and Orchestra on
January 21st 1943 - its premiere date and, incidentally, the composer's very last concert
performance.

Other works were played on this cold Ottawa night, but the orchestrated Concerto was
the featured piece. All things considered, though, its performance fell far short of
expectations. I was struck at how Bartok's Concerto is not just the lesser work, but how
very much it disappoints. Put very briefly, the edge of the Sonata's lucid, essentially
polyrhythmic core is mostly lost by transferring to the orchestra some of what the soloists
in the chamber arrangement discharge by other, simpler means.

If Bartok had not composed the Sonata, or if one were ignorant of it, this Concerto might
stand among the great Piano Concertos of its century. But how much more can be
achieved with the piano-and-percussion foursome, which is replete with rhythmic
incident, musical ideas and minor climaxes. Comparatively, this far less economically
chiselled, nowhere as sharply shaped Concerto verges on the dull.

The percussionists played superbly; in all other respects, things fell short of the mark. I
do not mean to speak ill of the performers, who deserve their applause just for traversing
this thorny musical thicket without mishap. That must be a fiendish task in either version,
given the many technical minefields and the unforgiving ensemble requirements -
especially since each player has such a palpable impact on the musical outcomes. These
performers tiptoed around the major challenges proficiently, although, as a result, the
something really sublime that this work can provide was not rendered.

Praise about proficiency sounds like a meagre accolade to give the performers, so I must
own up to a final mitigating factor, and a vital one: my expectations of either version of
this work have been conditioned by listening carefully to several recorded versions of it.
The piece has intrigued me for 25 years, and I even had a chance to attend a performance
of the Sonata in Toronto in the 1980s. But that was then and this is now, and only a
miracle performance could impress, as it now competes with a new, very puffed-up ideal.

This epitome - which it is grossly unfair to foist on any performers – has the clarity of
sound, artistic panache, and unity of purpose of the Kontarsky brothers' recording (on
DG), yet also the near-luxuriant rubato applied by the composer and his wife in the slow
movement (Hungaroton, in mono). Further, the Richter/Lobanov team's sense of
controlled abandon illuminates the whole work, particularly its third movement, where an
overlooked, near-circular rumbling passage is highlighted as the end approaches (a 'live'
Philips). My ideal version ends with the gentle tension shaped by Bernstein (mono CBS
rec. premiere), anticipating the graceful delivery by Gold/Fizdale of the work's two
closing chords.

Bert Bailey

Béla Bartók 1881–1945

The death of Béla Bartók in New York at the end of September deprives twentieth-
century music of one of its greatest masters. In depth and range his influence can be
compared only with that of Schönberg and Stravinsky, but it was more secret than theirs
and far less apparent. Bartók’s music has never become widely or thoroughly known; it
has never been a battle-cry; which has at least saved it from the grosser forms of
misunderstanding. In his early years he had no external aid, as, for instance, Stravinsky
had in the Russian ballet, by means of which works in new idioms could get a wider
hearing. He wrote no work which caused a headline riot, but could gradually become
familiar as it was carried by the glamour of novelty and spectacle. He was free from any
sort of advertisement. Nor did Bartók, like Schönberg, form a new technical and aesthetic
school in the very holy of holies of an ancient tradition; nor could he, for Hungary had in
music no such tradition. Perhaps this is why he found his own individual (his modern)
style before either Schönberg or Stravinsky found theirs, and why his earliest works are
fresher than theirs, less dated. He could travel with less luggage.

His existence was for the most part as isolated as his works. Except for invitations to
foreign capitals to play, say, one of his piano concertos – he was a brilliant, unique
pianist – he remained in his native Hungary, teaching the piano, sorting his immense
collections of folk-music, and steadily composing. For the last few years Bartók had been
living in the U.S.A. where he went after being exiled for standing out against the new
order in Hungary.

It is for his scholarly activities in folk-music that he is probably best known. From his
twenties, with his friend, Zoltan Kodály, he had been unearthing layer after layer, type
after type of the old pre-gipsy music of Hungary and the neighbouring countries, and of
Arabia even. This music entered deeply into his consciousness, and his folk-music
arrangements are models for all time. It also served as basis for an indigenous style.
Bartók took it as basis for his own developments, very radical ones, for his ideas of
expression were radical, and he was not one of those who leave folk-music as they find it.
We are faced here not only with the strangeness of the raw material, but with the
strangeness of Bartók’s uniquely original mind.

There were from the beginning three other determining influences on Bartók. Behind his
earliest works, such as the Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, the Deux Portraits and Two
Suites for orchestra there stand, to be sure, Brahms and Wagner and Strauss; but Liszt
was the dominating influence, and his admiration for Liszt never left him. It is well
known that even those who find Liszt’s compositions unsatisfactory as finished works of
art, admit that they contain, especially the later ones, a profusion of the most imaginative
ideas eminently capable of being worked out by his successors if only they possess an
equal imagination and, perhaps, a greater integrity. These ideas were by no means
exhausted by Busoni and Ravel. They are very plainly seen in, for instance, Bartók’s
magnificent, tragic and highly original Elegies, op. 8/b, for piano, and there are others.
These Elegies have a Lisztian wildness and temperament, but the intensity of expression
is matched by an equal intensity of will. Bartók is separated from his contemporaries in
Vienna by three barriers: Liszt; the piano (for he wrote piano music rather than music for
piano, to use Stravinsky’s distinction); and folk-music. Hence the freshness of his texture
compared with others.

Another great and lasting influence on Bartók was Debussy. This was not only of the
superficial kind that appeared in the work of all the young composers of that time to
whom Debussy’s music had come as a revelation and a promise of release. Not that
Bartók ever imitated; or perhaps he had only to imitate in order to be in fact original.
Besides, expression was always his aim, not effects of association. What he learned from
Debussy was new possibilities in the handling of notes and in the scope of music;
simplicity of expression and texture; direct statement without necessary and therefore
academic complications; the importance of our music of the individual note, of sonority,
which should lead to a new logic of melody and harmony adapted to express new types of
rhythm. The piano piece ‘Music of the Night,’ and the slow movements of the Dance
Suite for orchestra, the fifth Quartet, the Sonata for two pianos and percussion, and the
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta are wonderful examples in Bartók’s most
mature style of the direct aesthetic influence of Debussy.

The common feature of the really significant composers of our time is the search for
means with which to relate, contrast and unify all the valuable discoveries which cannot
be contained within the control of the classical key-system. Not to add patch after patch
to the old cloth, but to find architectonic principles capable of fulfilling over an
incomparably wider range of material what the old key relationships fulfilled over theirs,
is the goal. For these, if found, would mean the solution of the problem of how to write
large-scale works nowadays, how to have Beethoven’s scale if you have the will and a
like mind.
And Beethoven was the third great influence on Bartók. The affinity lies very deep.
Bartók has the same ruthless will to form, to personal form, the same intensity of
violence and tenderness, the same compelling, childlike directness of vision. These
qualities may give his music its frequent harshness, even uncouthness, but they give it
also its reality, its power and value.

Bartók’s earliest works show command of the romantic techniques then in vogue and
they attained some measure of popularity. It is indeed unaccountable that they have not
won a permanent place in the concert repertory. With the Fourteen Bagatelles, op. 6, for
piano, Bartók sacrificed popularity and became the most advanced composer of the day.
These short pieces are a landmark in his career and a complete dictionary of modern
music. In them can be found all the devices which Bartók has since exploited. They are
the testament of his whole development. Their characteristics are economy to the point of
starkness, the use of Magyar scales for both melody and harmony, great freedom in the
use of subsidiary notes, rhapsodic and insistent rhythms. They are lyrical and dramatic
statements, like Beethoven’s Bagatelles. There followed many more piano works, the
Esquisses, the Ten Easy Pieces, to name only a few, all of the same concentration and
expressive energy. To this time also belong the Allegro Barbaro, his most famous piece
and for many people the essence of Bartók, the four volumes of real and beautiful
children’s pieces, many folk-song arrangements, the ‘Deux Images’ for orchestra, op. 10,
and the first String Quartet, op. 8. The Images should be played more; they are an
excellent introduction to Bartók, as fresh and new in sonority now as when they were
written, and easier on the ear than most of the later works. The Quartet, op. 8, was his
first large-scale masterpiece, the first also of a series of six quartets constituting probably
the greatest contribution to the chamber music of our time. The first movement, lento, has
a wonderfully rich and indefinitely expressive polyphonic texture. The second, in a
livelier triple rhythm, develops quietly out of the first with as much variety of expression,
and is given at climaxes that Kodály-like volupté which Bartók so rarely uses. The last,
allegro vivace, has a wilder mood expressed with a bold and novel use of dissonance.

By 1920 Bartók had written an opera, ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’; two ballets, ‘The Wooden
Prince’ and ‘The Wonderful Mandarin,’ which develops the Allegro Barbaro manner; and
the second String Quartet (1915-17), one of his greatest works. The first movement of
this quartet is both passionate and serene. Its polyphony is even more highly developed
than that of the first quartet. One is occasionally surprised to find the harmony reminding
one of Scriabin, though it is completely transformed by Bartók’s very personal melodic
line and masterly texture. As for the style, there might have been no music since
Beethoven’s posthumous quartets. The second movement is in the Allegro Barbaro
manner, and the last, lento, is utterly stark, bare, lonely and tragic. Bartók had written
nothing so uncompromising before. We do not find this mood again until the slow
movements of the Piano Sonata (1926) and the Divertimento for Strings (1939).

The second Sonata for violin and piano (1923) can be considered, technically, as the
second landmark in Bartók’s development. It is at once a consolidation of his former
practice and a starting-point for still further explorations. The two movements are mature
examples of very characteristic moods, the freely rhapsodic and the stylized dance-
movement of elaborate and violent rhythms. The violin part is purely melodic, the piano
part almost entirely percussive, using what may be called chord-clusters. Being thus free
from the complexities of counterpoint, it serves as a particularly clear example of the
chief features of Bartók’s technique.

Tibor Serly, the Hungarian-American composer and Henry Pleasants, in an extremely

interesting joint article in ‘Modern Music,’ covered much of Bartók’s practice under one
general category. This is the principle of the unresolved passing-note, from which follows
the unresolved passing-chord and, more important still, the unresolved neighbouring
tonality. Bartók had in harmonizing music of folk-origin always drawn his harmonies out
of the scale of the tune. Frequently in original composition he mixed his modes. It would
seem thus far that the music could be analysed in the same way as the music of other neo-
modalists, however much more radical Bartók’s treatment might be. But in a more
advanced stage it could be analysed in terms of polytonality. At a more advanced, or
freer, stage still his melody seemed almost indistinguishable from that of the so-called
atonalists. Indeed his melody often did become as free as theirs. But in reality it is very
strongly anchored to a definite tonality. The superficial appearance of atonality is due to
the fact that the ear does not at first easily perceive the subsidiary tonalities within the
principal one. The anchorage, though, is essentially diatonic. A rider to this principle will
further explain why the tonality is now immediately perceived. Frequently the unresolved
passing-note is interchangeable with the note of resolution. It is not therefore difficult to
imagine the complexity, the possibilities for variety and freedom within the strong
control of simple relationships which this technique breeds when contrapuntal motion is
used. Yet the triad is at the base of this system. The results are to be seen in the immense
structures of the later quartets. In them Bartók has shown that it is possible to organize all
and any kinds of material in a consistent, intelligible style. The importance of this for the
future is enormous. By these means also he avoids the feeling of perpetual modulation,
whether effected by diatonic chromaticism or chromatic diatonicism.

Bartók is of course primarily a melodic composer, and a great contrapuntist. The feeling
is always carried by the melodic line and its rhythm. Harmony as such is subordinate. It
points the rhythms, gives relative emphasis in the phrasing, and strengthens the tonality.
By means of dissonance it keeps the line to clear, clean-cut, vigorous articulation. It is not
for nothing that Bartók made an extensive and thorough study of composers of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For they also treated harmony as a function of
melody as against the nineteenth-century composers who more and more did the reverse
until a dead end was reached. Bartók saw (nor was he the only one) that there were
possibilities of development from eighteenth-century practice other than that taken by the
romantics, which was one of more and more chromaticism. From 1923 on Bartók has
consciously developed his technique with the principles of the eighteenth century but
with all the resources and experience of a twentieth-century composer. What, then, is his
relationship to neo-classicism? It is certainly quite different from Stravinsky’s.

To speak of contemporary composers in terms of classicism and romanticism as if they

could be essentially either in an age which itself is neither may seem to many people
futile. The terms are, however, useful for historical reference and for a short-hand way of
drawing attention to analogies, however incomplete. And the slogan ‘neo-classicism’
forces the question on one’s attention. ‘Neo-classicism’ is the word for a specialized way
of writing and a certain attitude towards music, but it does not necessarily have any
relation to other or wider meanings of the word classicism. Bartók is not neo-classical in
this sense, nor does his espousal of eighteenth-century principles make him any the more
so. But there are phases in his development for the labelling of which the words classical
and romantic are useful. I am not thinking so much of the Form v. Feeling imbroglio, for
clearly in great music they are balanced, as of whether (1) the composer has the feeling or
idea and then finds the notes, or (2) whether he trusts his musical material (which,
anyway, has feeling inherent in it) to develop appropriately. The second will have as
much symbolism (content) as the first, but, granted the requisite feeling and aesthetic
sense, is likely to be more integrated and capable of longer flights. The first is likely to be
immature, new, the second mature, old. The first I call romantic, the second classical.
Bartók’s earlier works tend to the romantic, his later to the classical. When style cannot
be taken for granted, as at present, the progress of a significant composer will be from
romanticism to the equilibrium of classicism, as goal. This is a measure of the importance
of Bartók’s life: that maybe the technical means he found for achieving equilibrium will
be the means by which composers of the future will find it too; for to them it may be the
common vocabulary and stable syntax which we have been looking for since the
eighteenth century.

Bartók’s later works, then, the fruit of earlier victories, start in or around 1926 with the
first Piano Concerto and Piano Sonata. Much use is made of imitation, canon and fugue,
also of what some people would call rondo, others concerto grosso form. The style of the
sonata is nearer to the Italian Concerto of Bach than to any classical sonata form. These
works and those that follow are characterized by extreme harmonic acerbity reinforced by
the rhythmic insistence stemming originally, surely, from the Waldstein Sonata – the
‘Allegro Barbaro’ manner – and by very close conjunct movement in the melody and
counterpoint. Poetical in conception as the slow movements are, they too are just as
uncompromising.

With the second Piano Concerto comes greater emotional freedom in the fast movements,
and therefore more grandeur, more, too, of the old characteristic élan, and the slow
movement has a calm, unearthly beauty.

The third and fourth String Quartets followed in 1927 and 1928, the fifth in 1934. They
are all superb examples of the later style and models of what boldness can be achieved
within the limits of perfect quartet style. The two latter are in five movements, the central
one acting as a centre from which the others radiate. All the movements of both leave
unforgettable impressions. Later Bartók used the same principles in the broader manner
suitable to symphonic writing in the superb Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta.
Since then Bartók’s works have had a new buoyancy, emotional expansion and ease. This
applies even to the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, still on the fauve side; and the
Violin Concerto as well as the Divertimento for Strings are, without being any the less
original, positively ingratiating. From all accounts the new Concerto for Orchestra is too.
This emotional ease comes back to chamber music in his most intimate and gentle work,
the sixth Quartet. Lastly mention must be made of the 153 piano pieces called
Mikrokosmos. They are not only a complete course in piano-playing, but a breviary of
modern composition in general and of all the methods of Bartók’s later style in particular.

It is indeed a tragedy for music that Bartók should die in the midst of this new period, his
creative powers going from strength to strength, and just as he was making some contact
with audiences.

Béla Bartók was born on May 25, 1881, in a place then Hungarian but now Yugoslav,
and his early years were spent in various parts of the old dominion of Hungary. He
received his schooling in Pressburg and went from there to the Royal Hungarian Musical
Academy at Budapest where he studied piano and, under Hans Koessler, composition
from 1899 to 1903. He was appointed professor of piano at the Budapest Conservatoire
and there produced his one-act opera ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ in 1911 and in 1917 a ballet
‘The Woodcut Prince.’ Works of his were given regularly at the International Festivals of
Contemporary Music. He took refuge in America when the Nazis overran his country and
remained there till his death at the end of September.

Musical Times, November 1945

http://www.musicaltimes.co.uk/archive/obits/194511bartok.html

Print view
Author: Leong, Daphne

Title: Metric Conflict in the First Movement of Bartók's hitSonata hitfor hitTwo
hitPianos and hitPercussion

Reference: Theory and Practice - Journal of the Music Theory Society of New York State
24 (1999)

Publisher: Music Theory Society of New York State

Country of publication: USA

Language: English

ISSN: 0741-6156

URL for this item: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-

2004&res_dat=xri:iimp:&rft_dat=xri:iimp:article:citation:iimp00467922