BaL 29.02.20 - Bartók: Piano Concerto No 3.

[richardfinegold]

Not forgetting Kocsis/BFO/Ivan Fischer, which was not even considered.

Agreed. That disc also has superb versions of the first two Concertos
And I completely concur with Mac above

[Bryn]

As Bryn says, the version by Kocsis/BFO/Fischer certainly wasn't referred to throughout the progamme -- an extraordinary lapse on the part of the reviewer in that Zoltan Kocsis, Ivan Fischer, & the hand-picked cream of Hungarian musicians that comprise the Budapest Festival Orchestra turn in a performance which is both idiomatic & virtuosic.

Overall Kate Molleson did an OK job, but I seriously began to wonder at her musical judgement when she thrice referred to Bartók's first 2 piano concertos as "brutal". Not for me they're not -- no 1 an effervescent and inspiring exploration of North African rhythms & textures, spikily percussive and playful, and no 2 a joyful re-invention of baroque concerto grosso leavened with that spectral night-music...great, great works.

I'm reminded of my early experience of Bartok's music. I'd heard snatches on the Third but had not yet got the Fine Arts Quartets on Saga. I was walking past the open doors of the school hall when I heard some truly enticing music coming from the school grand. I went in to investigate and found a sixth form pupil playing from Book 6 of Mikrokosmos. Chatting with him over the weeks, as I got the Ancerl 3rd Piano Concerto and Viola Concerto and the Fine Arts SQs mentioned earlier. I asked him about the first two concertos and he advised, with great authority, that nobody has recorded them as they were unplayable. That from someone who revelled in Diary of a Fly! I can only assume he had never actually heard them and was relaying the ignorant views of the then music master at the school concerned.

[edashtav]

As Bryn says, the version by Kocsis/BFO/Fischer certainly wasn't referred to throughout the progamme -- an extraordinary lapse on the part of the reviewer in that Zoltan Kocsis, Ivan Fischer, & the hand-picked cream of Hungarian musicians that comprise the Budapest Festival Orchestra turn in a performance which is both idiomatic & virtuosic.

Overall Kate Molleson did an OK job, but I seriously began to wonder at her musical judgement when she thrice referred to Bartók's first 2 piano concertos as "brutal". Not for me they're not -- no 1 an effervescent and inspiring exploration of North African rhythms & textures, spikily percussive and playful, and no 2 a joyful re-invention of baroque concerto grosso leavened with that spectral night-music...great, great works.

I'm fascinated by Mac's comment about North African rhythms and textures in BB's 1st Piano Concerto.
Some people have identified non-Hungarian influences in his last Concerto.

Erik Chisholm, the Great Scottish 'Modernist' composer, was as keen on Scottish Folk Music as BB was on Hungarian. The two became friends, BB stayed with him in Glasgow and Erik conducted the first GB performances of Bluebeard's Castle. Could there be Scottish inflections in Bartok's 3rd Concerto ?

The following was written by EC's first wife, Diane, after BB's visit to her home in Glasgow at the end of February, 1932.

"Bartok confessed that this [Scottish Folk] was one branch of folk-music he had had no opportunity to study. In fact, I think he had not quite realised just what scope there was in it. To many continentals Scotland just seems to be the top-part of England with no particular characteristics of its own. How wrong they are!. If they travel to the North of Scotland and make contact with the Gaelic speaking population, see our tartans, Celtic Crosses, and hear our piobaireachd music, they may realise that we have certain Asiatic qualities which are not shared by the Sassenach.

Now, Scottish folk music, and especially Piobaireachd happened to be my husband's pet subject and particular study at that time. For years he had been doing considerable research in this line, so of course, he brought out various collections of folk-music and gramophone records, and Bartók listened and studied these for hours. The result of this conversation was, that the very next day Bartók went to a well-known shop in town which supplied all Highland requisites, and came home with a tartan rug, a chanter, all the piobaireachd music he could lay his hands on, and told us that the manager of the firm had arranged with one of our most noted Pipe-Majors to come next day to the Grand Hotel to play the bag-pipes to him (this was one thing my husband hadn’t been able to do.) Bartók was enchanted. It is a moot point whether his studies of the Asiatic piobaireachd had any influence on his subsequent works. In the first movement of his Third Piano Concerto there appears to be some Scottish melodic influence, but then again, the similarity between much of the Hungarian and Scottish Folk music which Bartók himself seized on, is such as to make a definite claim on this matter rather rash."

There's much Bartok in EC's music. Is there evidence that Bartok's last concerto could be called his Piobaireachd? Well, that's a claim far too far, but, maybe, just maybe, there's a dram of Scotch in it.

There is a short clip from Erik Chisholm's 1st Piano Concerto {piobaireachd} played by Danny Driver on Youtube

https://youtu.be/8t1KxFdqDBo

[Maclintick]

I'm reminded of my early experience of Bartok's music. I'd heard snatches on the Third but had not yet got the Fine Arts Quartets on Saga. I was walking past the open doors of the school hall when I heard some truly enticing music coming from the school grand. I went in to investigate and found a sixth form pupil playing from Book 6 of Mikrokosmos. Chatting with him over the weeks, as I got the Ancerl 3rd Piano Concerto and Viola Concerto and the Fine Arts SQs mentioned earlier. I asked him about the first two concertos and he advised, with great authority, that nobody has recorded them as they were unplayable. That from someone who revelled in Diary of a Fly! I can only assume he had never actually heard them and was relaying the ignorant views of the then music master at the school concerned.

A salutary reminiscence, Bryn -- in that it reminds one that perseverance is an essential attribute in expanding one's knowledge and appreciation of works which seem initially obscure/difficult/out-of-reach.
I played and replayed the first and second Bartók piano concertos incessantly before the veil was lifted & I was able to recognise & celebrate the genius behind these works...

[edashtav]

When Bartok Ate a Barrister.

WHEN BARTOK ATE AN ADVOCATE (a story told by Erik Chisholm)
Many years later when Bartók was in Los Angeles he tasted for the first time avocado pear. Writing to a friend, Bartók said
"In Los Angeles I ate an advocate (abogado). This is a fruit somewhat like a cucumber in size and colour, but quite buttery in texture ,so it can be spread on bread. Its flavour is something like an almond but not so sweet. It has a place in this celebrated fruit salad which consists of green salad + apple + celery + pineapple + raw tomato + mayonnaise".

[The Spanish word abogado means advocate but avocado is a corruption of their word aguate.]

[edashtav]

Last night I posted in #93 about Bartok's exposure to Scottish folk music at the home of Erik Chisholm. This morning I'd like to quote Chisholm again about the Hungarian's scrupulous observance of time / tempo and his approach to neo-classicism in the 1920s. The latter should be in the Holberg thread but I suspect the BaL lobby on this board are omnivorous.

"I remember that Bartók carried a stop watch with him, and at rehearsal in the Berkley Hall, placed the watch at the side of the piano and timed each piece to a split second. If the timing was not precisely as expected he would shake his head in gentle reproof. In fact, it is a fetish of his that he supplies the most accurate timing for all his smaller pieces. Bartók began his Glasgow recital with four of his own transcriptions of early keyboard music. The transcriptions published by Fischer of New York have received scanty notice from Bartók biographers: Halsey Stevens, however, in his book "The Life and Music of Bela Bartók" states that Bartók was occupied in 1926-27 with the transcription of 17th and 18th century Italian keyboard music, and that this interest had a direct bearing on the style and character of his own "Out of Doors" suite, written in 1926. After he had played through these pieces, on the morning of his concert, Bartók turned to me saying: "You know, Mr. Chisholm, that whenever I play these transcriptions, the critics always complain that I have made considerable modifications in the originals. As a matter of fact, I have not altered a single note." Although I didn't say so at the time, I could see why this mistake had been made, for Bartók played this music in his own dynamic, rhythmically arresting fashion, so that, even if all the notes were the same, the music sounded as though Bartók had altered it." [Shades of Igor?]

[Maclintick]

I'm fascinated by Mac's comment about North African rhythms and textures in BB's 1st Piano Concerto.
Some people have identified non-Hungarian influences in his last Concerto.

Erik Chisholm, the Great Scottish 'Modernist' composer, was as keen on Scottish Folk Music as BB was on Hungarian. The two became friends, BB stayed with him in Glasgow and Erik conducted the first GB performances of Bluebeard's Castle. Could there be Scottish inflections in Bartok's 3rd Concerto ?

Ed, many thanks for the Chisholm connection. Until today I was entirely ignorant of this interesting composer -- the McBartók epithet not entirely undeserved as his music contains a plethora of BB fingerprints. On the other hand, the filigree textures of the Piobaireachd movement in the Dance Suite for Piano & Orchestra struck me as reminiscent of another folk-influenced master, Ravel, & the finale of this same piece almost disintegrates into a Caledonian La Valse, the reels unreeling and unravelling the musical fabric ....again, dancing about architecture, no doubt...

Back to Bartók -- I would urge anyone travelling to Budapest to make the pilgrimage to his house in the Buda Hills, since 2010 a memorial museum where one can take in his composing room with piano & phonograph, slightly creepy collection of lepidoptera & coleoptera -- shades of another 20th cent. genius, Vladimir Nabokov -- B&W photographs of expeditions in Transylvania -- the urbane composer & phonograph precariously balanced amid farmworkers on a horsedrawn cart. I was the lone attendee on the morning I visited.

[edashtav]

Ed, many thanks for the Chisholm connection. Until today I was entirely ignorant of this interesting composer -- the McBartók epithet not entirely undeserved as his music contains a plethora of BB fingerprints. On the other hand, the filigree textures of the Piobaireachd movement in the Dance Suite for Piano & Orchestra struck me as reminiscent of another folk-influenced master, Ravel, & the finale of this same piece almost disintegrates into a Caledonian La Valse, the reels unreeling and unravelling the musical fabric ....again, dancing about architecture, no doubt...

[…]
.

McBartok, McRavel... I'm afraid you've got the measure of Erik (he must have transmogrified into McSatie somewhere in his oeuvre), Mac! I always feel sad for such nearly men and women.

[Sir Velo]

Overall Kate Molleson did an OK job, but I seriously began to wonder at her musical judgement when she thrice referred to Bartók's first 2 piano concertos as "brutal". Not for me they're not -- no 1 an effervescent and inspiring exploration of North African rhythms & textures, spikily percussive and playful, and no 2 a joyful re-invention of baroque concerto grosso leavened with that spectral night-music...great, great works.

In the interests of objectivity, she did actually only refer to the first as brutal and the second as "bravado" as in "the bravado of the second". There is certainly brutality in the first, and I do not think she used the adjective in a pejorative fashion.

[Maclintick]

In the interests of objectivity, she did actually only refer to the first as brutal and the second as "bravado" as in "the bravado of the second". There is certainly brutality in the first, and I do not think she used the adjective in a pejorative fashion.

Purely objectively, in the first instance Kate Molleson refers to "the brutality of the 1st and the bravado of the 2nd". Later on she says of the first 2 concertos "they are much thornier, they're much more brutal", and then, even later on, when discussing Boulez's recordings "Krystian Zimerman gets the very brutal 1st concerto".

Whether or not she intended it as a pejorative description, I can't agree with KM's characterisation of the rhythmically propulsive & often joyful 1st concerto as "brutal", at least not in the sense of unrestrained savagery present in, say, The Miraculous Mandarin, to give an example from BB's own oeuvre.

[Bryn]

Purely objectively, in the first instance Kate Molleson refers to "the brutality of the 1st and the bravado of the 2nd". Later on she says of the first 2 concertos "they are much thornier, they're much more brutal", and then, even later on, when discussing Boulez's recordings "Krystian Zimerman gets the very brutal 1st concerto".

Whether or not she intended it as a pejorative description, I can't agree with KM's characterisation of the rhythmically propulsive & often joyful 1st concerto as "brutal", at least not in the sense of unrestrained savagery present in, say, The Miraculous Mandarin, to give an example from BB's own oeuvre.

My reaction to the works in question pretty much precisely. The night music second movement of the 1st is, to me, anything but brutal. The leap into the joyous dance of the final movement lifts my heart, every time. I certainly do not feel in any way brutalised by it.

[richardfinegold]

Picking recordings from my streamer yesterday, after listening to Kocsis/Fisher I then played the Andante Religioso movement from the old Vox recording, Sandor /Gielen and the Vienna Symphony from 1974. I had owned this set on lp but probably hadn’t spun the CD replacement more than once. The soloist phrasing and dynamics are wonderful as well as the partnership with the Orchestra.

[Sir Velo]

Not at all condescending, LMP - on the contrary, your thoughts are much appreciated. I think 'timid' is a very good adjective for my approach to Bartok until now! Will definitely snap up the Schiff disc on your recommendation.

I wonder how MickyD is progressing in his Bartok immersion?

[LeMartinPecheur]

I wonder how MickyD is progressing in his Bartok immersion?

MickyD, come in MickyD, come in MickyD, please state your position....

[BBMmk2]

I played the Bavouzet a few days ago. Yes, very good!