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Bartók New Series
The 125th anniversary of Béla Bartók's birth in 2006 saw the launch of the Bartók New Series, which presents the composer's entire oeuvre on 31 CDs.
A Bartók Complete Edition was made thirty years ago, and to this day it remains the most important production of Hungarian musical performing arts and sound recording. The series of LPs, recently also released in CD format, brought resounding success not only to the label, but also showed the international recognition of Hungarian musical culture, for example by winning of one of the prestigious Cannes MIDEM prizes in 2002. Yet one is forced to concede that, despite its unequivocal value, artistically and technically the day of the old Hungaroton complete edition has passed.
What should be expected of a new Bartók edition?
Hungarian orchestral culture stands on a much higher level than thirty years ago. And source research – thanks to the complete printed edition in preparation at the Bartók Archives in Budapest – provides unparalleled scholarly support for the interpretation of Bartók. And there is the performer-personality of Zoltán Kocsis, who as a pianist and in recent years as a conductor has reached the zenith of his career, and who in the eyes of critics from both Hungary and abroad is the trustee of an exceptionally forceful interpretation of Bartók.
The timeliness of this new Bartók series is further borne out by the leaps and bounds with which audio recording technology has developed (digital processing, SACD format).
With composer Zoltán Jeney as president, the Bartók New Series Foundation has formed, and an expert committee has taken shape consisting of three important Bartók specialists of our time. We are releasing the Bartók oeuvre divided into five groups according to genre (orchestral works, chamber music, songs, choral works, works for piano), first as individual CDs, then grouped in box sets. Recordings are expected to be completed by 2010, and the entire series should be released by 2011.
The orchestral works (including stage works) are recorded with the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Zoltán Kocsis, and Kocsis plays the piano part of the chamber works, songs and choral works, as well as Bartók's transcriptions of pieces by Baroque composers. No new recordings will be made of the solo piano works: Hungaroton is using Kocsis's complete edition of solo piano works released on the Philip's label, in addition to the Rhapsody and Scherzo with the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by Iván Fischer. The series is completed with valuable archive recordings (such as Bartók's own piano playing or the recording of the world premiere of the Violin Concerto with Zoltán Székely). The studies accompanying the CDs, written by outstanding Bartók researchers from Hungary and abroad, are given in four languages.
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Béla Bartók 125
Tibor Tallián's study to celebrate the anniversary
Sixty years after his death on 26 September 1945, and 125 years after his birth on 25 March 1881, it is tempting to take for granted the frequent appearance of the name of Béla Bartók on concert programmes, opera house posters, disc sleeves and covers, and as a subject for music school lessons. After all, what place could be more natural for the presence of a great composer's name, than where music and the community of music lovers arrange to meet? Yet there is something worthy of note in both the fact that his oeuvre is widely known, and that this shows no sign of abating. Bartók was already known as a composer in the 1910s, though his recognition meant acceptance only in a narrow circle of believers in modern art. Like the music of other innovative composers of the twentieth century, Bartók's art too provoked antipathy, sometimes even rage, in his average contemporary listener. Things began to change in the middle of the 1940s; the works written in the last period empathy did much to foster empathy towards Bartók's music. During the second wave of avant-garde that unfolded in the 1950s and 60s, the general public too fell under the spell of the style of the pieces written in the 1910s and 20s. Since then the place of the oeuvre in the repertoire has stabilised, whilst of course the number of performances was and is subject to variations of greater or lesser degree. Every decade finds something to re-evaluate in Bartók; every new tendency recognises in him an ancestor. Some are more attracted by the Romantic—Classical sound of his late works, others by his expressionist or activist music; at times the Concerto for Orchestra acquires emblematic significance, other times The Miraculous Mandarin, or again the Outdoors piano cycle. Today perhaps the strongest interest is shown in Bluebeard's Castle. It is telling that, in the confusion of these early years in the century, a living–thinking person should choose this ballad-opera, a particularly substantial symbol of human intimacy, as the medium for the Bartók message.
The number of recordings of Bluebeard's Castle is continuously growing (outside Hungary, we must add with some dismay). In addition to the interest of the record-buying public, the plethora of recordings available is in great part the result of initiative on the supply side: every great bass, dramatic soprano or mezzo-soprano and decent conductor wants to preserve their own reading. An especially impressive display of their ambition is their grasp of the language, at times astonishingly successful: only rarely does a Hungarian listener detect a foreign accent in the pronunciation of English Bluebeards and Swedish Judits, and this does nothing to detract from the dramatic and psychological authenticity of the performance. Bartók was especially proud that in his opera, based on the parlando (speech-like) melodic lines of Hungarian folksong, he managed to create dramatic Hungarian Sprechgesang. How galling it must have been for him to be conscious of the limited scope of this great achievement; in his lifetime the opera was slow to take root even on the Hungarian stage, and for many years a Hungarian performance abroad was unthinkable: at one point Universal Edition published the music for the opera and other vocal works without any Hungarian text! But they paid the price for their defeatism: current practice has made orchestral and vocal scores without the Hungarian text unusable, while performers and public alike, armed with the translation, lose themselves in the experience induced by the intimate link between the language and the music of the opera. An opera which might have been expected, due to both its language and its content, to be one of the least accessible pieces in the oeuvre, proves to be the most frequent means used to convey the culture. It serves as an example of one of the lessons learnt over the last 125 years: as a musician, Béla Bartók is the most credible spokesman, heard in the furthest reaches, not just for Hungarian music and art, but increasingly for the Hungarian language, and through this the entire community of Hungarian culture.
Ambassador for the language is only one, relatively marginal element of Bartók's services rendered in the field of Hungarian intellectual international relations. It is impossible to quantify the great moral and political benefit brought to Hungary, (notoriously the last power to align itself with Germany after the outbreak of World War II) by his artistic and human integrity, beyond all doubt, which from the 1940s on, through his works and his conduct, increasing numbers witnessed worldwide. More significantly, and in a more general sense, Hungary's prestige is boosted by the fact that in the fierce creative power that gave birth to Bartók's music, the outside world may see proof of the extraordinary abilities of the nation – perhaps justifiably so.
A defining gesture in the cathartic, purifying effect of Bartók's music is the elemental power in the presence of peasant and folk songs and music. But does the listener identify the folkloristic components in the melodic, rhythmic and harmonic motives of Bartók's music? For sure, although each to a different extent, and with differing aesthetic functions. On hearing the wordless four-line pentatonic melody at the beginning of Bluebeard's Castle, any listener with some degree of musical literacy perceives more or less clearly the peculiarities of the ballad strophe, but unless he is Hungarian, he would be hard pressed to identify the ethnic-national characteristics of the melody, which a Hungarian listener with the necessary knowledge would undoubtedly recognise and appreciate on the aesthetic level. As we now know, it took even the Hungarian concert- and opera-going public decades to learn to acknowledge and accept the Hungarian quality in the peasant folksongs paraphrased in Bartók's music, at least as far as the oldest type of folk music was concerned: the melodies and the performance style were completely unknown to the urban population. In fact when he started collecting, exactly one hundred years ago, not even the peasants kept the tradition alive.
Bartók, in his typical matter-of-fact manner, often explained what spurred him along the path to learning about peasant folk music and renewing his own music in the spirit of folk music: the programme of renewal in national music was defined by the search for new content for personal and national identity. After the break-up of old Hungary, acknowledging and maintaining a Hungarian identity took on a new emphasis in his art: one of László Somfai's most sensitive observations points to how an enthusiastic and enlightened Hungarian voice sounds at the climax of almost all Bartók's movements and works composed after 1920. The emotional effect of this on a susceptible Hungarian listener is due to the unbroken faithfulness of Bartók's art to the ideal of the [Hungarian] nation. For it to be understood universally, however, we should say that Bartók considered folk music a “natural phenomenon”, and as a result, all content he discovered in folk music held for him a deeper, more instinctive and more general meaning than could be reduced to a simple political message, even in the highest sense. Bartók, it is well-known, valued folk music as equal, classically perfect art on a par with the works of the great masters: this oft-repeated statement should be understood to mean that folk music, which on the one hand guarantees the national character of art, also testifies to the commitment to general and ideal human values, and the endeavour towards them.
Almost simultaneously with Bartók's, interest re-awoke in the music of the peasant populations of Hungarians, as well as Slovaks and Romanians – the two large ethnic groups living alongside Hungarians since the Middle Ages. His vast Slovak and Romanian folk music collections, and the smaller Ruthenian and Serb ones, all took place on the territory of historical Hungary before the end of the First World War. Contrary to statements which though tolerable in foreign literature are quite unforgivable in Hungarian, Bartók never collected in the “territory of neighbouring countries”; we can justifiably see a silent protest against the Trianon Peace Treaty in the fact that from 1918 he carried out no folk song collecting field work at all in the Carpathian Basin, including the territory of post-1920 Hungary. However, he continued to extend his knowledge of folksong: In 1934 in Bucharest he studied recordings of folk music, in the USA he transcribed a multitude of Serbo-Croatian heroic songs and lyrical folksongs, and he strove to work through his folk music collections of several other eastern and central European and Balkan peasant ethnic groups. As a researcher he turned his attention for one significant moment to peoples distantly related to the Hungarians, and studied Arab and Turkish folk music too.
At that time, in that region, where researchers and composers looked beyond the borders of the folk music of their own nation at most with assimilative intention, with the breadth of his vision and the consistent application of the comparative method Bartók created an era – an era of which he was more or less the only contemporary. What is certain is that during his forty-odd years' work in ethnomusicology he never lost sight of the original purpose of comparative work, formulated in the 1900s: the demonstration of the distinguishing features of music of the Hungarian community. But the mature Bartók recognised that distinction is meaningless unless placed in a universal context. In relation to his work as a composer he formulated this principle quite concretely in 1930, using what for him was unusually clear political terminology: “My compositional oeuvre, precisely because it derives from a triple source – Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak – can be considered the embodiment of the idea of integration which is given so much emphasis in Hungary today. Yet my true ideal, which since finding my own voice as a composer, I have been perfectly aware of, is the brotherhood of peoples, despite all war and strife. As far as my powers permit, I serve this ideal in my music; for this reason there is no influence from which I protect myself, whether it derive from Slovak, Romanian, Arab or any other source – but the source should be pure, fresh, and healthy!”
It would be exciting to see whether Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian peasant women, who to this day sing old-style folk music, recognise their own musical language reflected in Bartók's style. To my knowledge nobody has yet carried out such a study. Bartók was utterly occupied with the enormous undertaking of mastering folk music, as a scholar and a musician. Unlike Kodály, it was only as a scholarly question that he dealt with what people do when they are not singing (or no longer sing) authentic folksongs. Being a professional pianist and music teacher, through his pedagogic works for children of the intelligentsia (among them large-scale series of folk music arrangements, such as For Children, or Forty-Four Duos for two violins), he promoted the musical literacy of broader social strata, including the spread of folk music. Other of his folksong and folk music arrangements are expressly concert pieces, demanding both technically and musically, and in some of which he reached – as he himself admitted speaking of the Improvisations – “the final frontier in the linking together of folksongs and bold experimentation”.
Over the last eighty or so years the boldness of his folksong arrangements, and indeed his whole compositional oeuvre, has not faded. In fact it has become more pronounced, as the compositional boldness of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart or Beethoven presumably exercises a greater impression on today's listener than on their contemporaries, who had not yet learnt to immerse themselves in the music, as the masters' boldness has brought posterity to do. Bartók did not write folk music. On the contrary: from the moment he recognised, or more accurately: defined for himself “genuine” folk music, he ruthlessly opposed the musical genres fashioned for the use of the people, which in his judgement attempted with ignoble means to give the impression of folksiness. We must respect his view, but looking back from the twenty-first century we do not necessarily have to agree in every respect. If the folk music movement had acted with more patience, if it had supported the peaceful coexistence of folk-style music and folksong, perhaps in Hungary too there might have formed a uniform national musical repertoire for entertainment and use which would have provided to this day a characteristic image to the music use of the many neighbouring peoples, and this would provide a certain protection against the global onslaught of popular musics. In recent decades many attempts have been made to revitalise folk music, most of them in the spirit of instrumental music and folk dance, and in their multiethnic tendency in the Carpathian Basin, the inspiration of Bartók is clear.
The inspirational influence of folk music on Bartók's music cannot be emphasised enough; but neither can we warn sufficiently of the danger of overemphasising it. On more than one occasion, Bartók himself highlighted the fact that in his “original works” he never used a folksong collected from peasants: his “folksong style” melodies were always composed by him – sometimes they are hardly distinguishable from the folk style, sometimes he instinctively or consciously strove to separate them. This reflectivity and internal distancing contributed to the individuality of his art, but did not in itself guarantee it. Like every composer, he too was brought up in the school of European art music, which is becoming universal. Right to the end, his most original and new ideas fed on this spirit, including the use of folk music – after all, the very concept and ideal of the “new” in art is European. Right to the end, his work as a composer and performer served to enrich this great art music tradition.
More than any of his Hungarian contemporaries, Bartók lived out in the open professionally: he came before the world musical public eye at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and up to the moment of his death he remained there, continuously receiving and returning inspiration. Not only his link to folk music, but his entire artistic mode de vivre were characterised by openness, in the spirit of the maxim quoted above: “the source should be pure, fresh and healthy”. In the decades of stewardship of his heritage, this openness was for a long time brushed over. Certain influential persons in Hungarian musical life, even during Bartók's lifetime, saw his work and that of Zoltán Kodály as worthy of appreciation only at the expense of underestimating other great masters of 20th century music. After his death (discounting the anti-Bartók hysteria of socialist music doctrine c. 1950) his person and art, the “Bartók model”, as the programme for contemporary Hungarian art, became the object of almost religious veneration, as exclusive as “thou shalt not have strange gods”. The political authorities, also striving for exclusivity, attempted to exploit the respect for Bartók in the spirit of their own “building a new world” ideology: Bartók, the harbinger of socialism. The “Bartók, our standard-bearer” attitude proved damaging in the sense that sooner or later all absolutism turns against its original purpose; absolutism is detached from circumstances, from context, and shirks the obligation to take stock of the world responsibly and independently.
In the 20th century, time and time again mankind struggled with the obsession of a plannable future, which draws on the idea of historical necessity; an obsession which repeatedly strove for total control over human thought and conduct. Today, when in the eastern and central European region, under the apparently unbearable pressure of the new situation, the obsession of plannability has been replaced by the anger of adaptation, we must beware of those who claim to know infallibly which ballast to throw out of the airship, so that the airship of country, the region, the continent, the world, may continue its journey: “thou shalt have no gods whatsoever”. Bartók's oeuvre, continually changing in its uniformity, provides a dual moral. One is that the trap of absolutism can only be avoided by the continuous inspection of the paradigms. The other, is that inspection can only be carried out in the possession of authentic measure.
(published: Muzsika 49/March 2006)
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Bartók Interpretation and National Music
Zoltán Kocsis Talks to Zoltán Farkas
There is a popular notion that “Bartók is properly understood by Hungarian musicians”. To perform Bartók authentically do you have to know Hungarian?
How the language is spoken is certainly important. Even so, I usually give the counter example of the Juilliard Quartet; they were never a Hungarian group, none of them has any connection with Hungary, yet even so they've managed to learn Bartók's musical language.
We should say the string quartets are where this kind of knowledge is least needed, since they bear least the imprints of the national character. Most of the piano works require you to be Hungarian or Eastern European. I would not insist on being Hungarian, since someone Eastern European can get the essence of the music not just of their own country but also that of their neighbouring countries better than someone from another continent or Western Europe.
I feel that – especially recently – the tradition of performing Bartók has taken a turn that clearly guarantees him a place in the European canon, while stripping him of those characteristics without which Bartók's music may no longer be Bartók...
A mishmash is most evident in the orchestral works, after all it's much more difficult on an instrument comprising eighty individuals to realize the characteristic things that Bartók so easily brings into relief by himself on the piano. My own view, and one often criticized, is that you don't have to be born into a nation in order to play its music well. It's simply a matter of talent.
But in Bartók's case, an acquaintance with folk music is unavoidable. I would have to look very hard in music to find another composer who is so much intertwined with folk music, and whose music is so much inspired by it. Even Stravinsky, as he often said, owes far less to folk music inspiration. The folk-style of Janáček has real folk-music behind it but no conscious attempt at systematization or any deep knowledge of folk music as a whole, as we find in Bartók and Kodály.
Regarding Bartók, we cannot overlook the fact that some (perhaps even most) of his folk-song arrangements, or music of demonstrably folk music inspiration, probably come from Romanian folk music.
Bartók's music is a ‘tough morsel to chew', because it consists of a huge number of elements. Just to look at it superficially, we can see at least five sources. The national romantic idiom with reminiscences of a Ferenc Erkel-flavoured ‘heel-clicking' ‘verbunkos' style, the French influence, folk-song, the tangential effect of the second Viennese School, then Stravinsky's appearance on the scene, and finally the arrival of the period when, having merged all these together, he writes what he wants and as he wants it. The last I would date from around the Fifth String Quartet, after which Bartók doesn't concern himself much with questions of style. To play Bartók, you must in fact know all five styles at ‘native speaker' level.
You have made a complete recording of Bartók's piano works which is a benchmark. Anyone dealing seriously with Bartók must take into consideration your set of CDs. Now that you are the chief conductor of the Hungarian National Philharmonic, have you thought of facing the challenge of doing the same for the orchestral works?
Certainly we should do it. The trouble is, I don't like complete recorded editions. The simplest explanation is probably that they include the ‘residue'. Residue in the bad sense. The common approach to a complete recorded edition is “the important works come first, and then we'll somehow throw in all the others, the less interesting.” Having said so much to denigrate I agree with Boulez, when he says: “I'd rather hear and play the scrips and scraps of the great composers than possibly good works by the lesser composers.” I am the same: an idea rejected by Bartók is of more value to me than the best work by a recognized second-rate Western composer. It was in this spirit that I tried to approach the complete recording of the solo piano works. I'd like to do the same with the orchestral works, too.
From my point of view there is the question of whether Bartók's system of agogics so characteristic of his playing (I would venture to say it was what taught me the most) can be realized with an orchestra. My answer is definitely that it can. But you have to want to do it. For example take the eight syllable line melody in the middle of the 3rdmovement of the Concerto for Orchestra which can be sung to lots of different words of folksongs, like “Fehér László lovat lopott” (László Fehér stole some horses), “Kalapom a Tiszán úszkál” (My hat's floating on the Tisza) etc. You have to learn some of the words, and play the whole viola part as though it was singing them. Then it will be as it should be. Of course, you can teach foreign orchestras to do it, perhaps in translation. I think music exceeds language. Yet at the same time language remains important. It's not so important, as it happens, in the Miraculous Mandarin, but now I can't imagine the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta or the Divertimento without some connection with language being present in the performance. I consider one of the best recordings so far of the Divertimento to be the one with the Camerata Academica by Sándor Végh. In it I can feel that from the point of view of the string playing, the idiom and its Eastern European character, this performance is so far the best.
I'll give you another example! There's a ritornello section in the Dance Suite which appears many times, and many conductors make the mistake of interpreting it as a kind of slow item, just as in the fourth movement of the Dance Suite they make the same mistake. (Another example of ignoring Bartók's markings.) So we have two things in the Dance Suite which – to put it kindly – make the performance boring, and not put kindly are sloppiness, superficiality, and a complete neglect of the composer's intentions. A clearly perceptible and easily understood counter-argument is that it is a Dance suite, hence the Ritornello is also dance-like, and what is apparently a slow fourth movement is also some form of dance. The Dance Suite is one of Bartók's hardest works, because you have to absorb many idioms and moods, since the piece is very heterogeneous.
I've heard people say over and over again that you needn't take the metronome markings too seriously, since Bartók himself didn't do it either. Similarly it has been said about the folk element that it is perhaps not the most important aspect of Bartók's music, and if we discard it, then Bartók is just as much a classic as other European composers. I don't agree. Folk music is so amalgamated with the other ingredients of his music that it is impossible to strip him of it, like stripping off a coat. Bartók's own playing shows us the path we should follow when playing his music, and I feel many musicians are not on that path today.
(The Hungarian Quarterly, vol. 46, Spring 2005 – excerpts)
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Conversation with Zoltán Kocsis at the Bartók Memorial House
Press conference of the National Cultural Fund on the occasion of the publication of
the 10th CD in the Bartók New Series
3 February 2009
Kocsis: Greetings to all of you. The idea here was out to do something different. The initiative originally came from Péter Nádori who couldn't come today. The series was created not as an improvement on the old complete works published by Hungaroton, the one in green boxes.
Mácsai: Péter Nádori may not be here, but he is with us in spirit. He gave me a call to tell us not to use the term “complete works.”
K.: I'd be inclined to say it's in a way more “complete” than the old series in that the old complete works was not a critical edition. For example, it did not include that earlier version of Suite No. 2. Allow me to digress. At least four versions of the Suite No. 2 are available. We had a close look at Bartók's version originally published by Universal Edition, and eventually recorded movements 3 and 4 in the form they appear in that edition. Which is a good thing because a different form of the same work affords a different approach. At least it struck me how the orchestra was able to be more creative with the older form. Which lost currency ages ago, since Bartók re-worked it in 1943. Going back to the initiative, it was not my idea but perhaps Péter Nádori's or Géza Kovács's or perhaps everybody's wanting something better, wanting to break loose from the terrible doctrinaire attitude of the Sixties' spirit. In any case, at the very outset I insisted that the old Bartók's complete works could not be revamped on account of the fact that it included not only questionable productions but some that were downright shoddy, such as my recordings of the Piano Concerti No. 1 and 2 which I cannot identify with. It is a known fact that this style cannot be approached via the spirit of Fifties' and Sixties' musical education. I clearly recall when the first recording of the Piano Concerti No. 1 and 2 came out as part of that old complete works of Bartók, László Somfai called my attention to the fact (only not in these words) that they lacked the Bartókian idiom that made the performance of Bartók's own works so characteristic; that is, an alertness, the presence of parlando-rubato that is so striking about Bartók's piano-playing, or the system of accentuation which naturally creates a hierarchy in the sounding reality. He was completely right, and it took me, or took us (I'm not alone in this, thank god!), a good couple of years in the field to realise that there are three very specific sources that can be taken as points of reference in redressing the balance in the Bartókian tradition: the works Bartók left us, his writings on music and the recordings of Bartók playing Bartók. The recordings where Bartók plays Bartók have to be considered as part of the critical edition, since the composer overwrote the music with his performance, making for the composer's alternative renditions that the editors of modern editions hasten to insert into the score. All of this was very welcome indeed, but it has to be said that the return to the Bartókian idiom was naturally a very gradual process. I'm addressing this to the previous speakers [László Harsányi, Máté Hollós] because I'm aware that spectacular results would be great, but our task is rather to establish a long-term course – genuinely long-term, meaning decades or centuries – because we are by no means advocates of an elitist standpoint. By calling them “standard-setting performances” we don't necessarily mean they're the best available versions, but at least they pave the way towards the Bartókian tradition. After all, two elements of this idiom are rapidly decaying; one is folk music, by which I don't only mean Hungarian folk music. Kodály is an easier matter in this respect in that he didn't collect anything else but Hungarian folk music – with the exception of a few Romanian soldiers' songs and the Slovakian collecting trip that fell to him as a result of the distribution of locations between Bartók and him. Bartók, however, went to Turkey and Algeria, and soaked up folk music in Bulgaria, too. He went to all of the distant lands whose folk music was provably related to the most ancient layers of Hungarian music. In effect, then, everything is related to everything. That is exactly what Bartók's music reflects. It is not a conglomerate, but a truly peerless blend of different styles of folk music. There is no other such music in the world. Having some awareness of the complexity of this and of the astonishing demand his music makes on us, performers, I can say that it takes a very long time indeed to digest. The performer of Bartók's music has to have profound knowledge of a great many things. His music cannot be a mere foray for the performer. Where the performer regards it as a foray, he or she will not create anything lasting.
M.: Forgive me for straying from the complete works, but talking about setting standards, can I ask you to what extent do the recordings of Bartók playing Bartók help or hinder the performer? Meaning the piano recordings, of course. How much are they inspiring or disconcerting?
K.: It would be very tempting to analyse a few of Bartók's recordings. I think that listening to most of his recordings instantly reveals the irresolvable contradiction between Bartók on the surface and Bartók on the interior. Here's a grey-haired little bespectacled professor wearing a hat, carrying a briefcase, but listen to a recording that makes a great demand on the performer, such as the last of the Nine Little Piano Pieces, “Preludio – All'ungherese” – which is a late recording, by which time Bartók's shoulder was probably unwell and he was no longer in possession of his full technical armoury either – but nevertheless he starts out the little professor and ends an erupting volcano. The way in which the piece writes itself in the course of the recording is unprecedented in the history of music. It is clear that he is out to play to eternity, but in the fifth second the music makes you forget that. Also, he does not exaggerate his idioms. I mean that his renderings only sound unusual to the extent that he seeks to adjust his idioms to his own physiological characteristics. It is certain that, as always, the musical intention comes first and then the performer's rendering. We are looking at crystallised performances that rightfully intimidate the performer. Take for example “Tambourine” (Csörgő-tánc) which is just perfect as it is, and it only occupies one side of a 10-inch Durium-Pátria record that would hold three works by the composer. Or there's the HMV recording of “A bit drunk” which is staggering. We were recording Hungarian Sketches (and here I take it to be an open secret that Divertimento, Music and Hungarian Sketches are the next to follow) the same question kept coming back, whether the Bartókian idioms could be made to come through in an orchestra, and the answer is clearly that they can, as long as one makes an effort to do so. A routine orchestral attitude won't do much, and neither will it help to just play what's in the score. It is widely held that with certain composers, such as Schubert, it is enough to play the music. Well, I don't know. While there is plenty to argued about, I believe that there is no music without an underlying context and there is probably no music without its own system of agogics and accentuation either. And that applies to entire music history. I think it is wrong to believe that it is enough to render pre-Classical music (going back to the very beginnings) in a metrically perfect form, as it appears in the score. Bach, too, has his agogic system, as does, I believe, every kind of music. What sets Bartók apart is the fact that he requires awareness of very many things indeed, including, on a basic level, earlier Hungarian music and entire music history. However we look at it, Bartók, Schoenberg and Stravinsky are all rooted in Romanticism. Also, one has to be familiar with Bartók's early career, Dohnányi, etc., and all of the Romantic roots of his music, and also with Central and Eastern European folk music, Stravinsky and a lot more, including piano technique. We must never forget that we're dealing with a pianist-composer whose orchestral works are evocative of a piano-music fabric to a greater extent than those of the other pianist-composer, Rachmaninov.
Many of the trends that have come to be identified with us, Hungarians, and that have gained currency in the great concert halls around the world, would make Bartók and Kodály turn in their graves. We can take on this heavy artillery with well-targeted gunshots. But that isn't enough. This adds double significance to this series which, like I said, does not lay claim to being “number one,” but merely wishes to show the way in a terrible world that is, particularly in musical terms, chaotic. Musical education, many of whose representatives are here today, assumes a crucial role. Musical education, too, has its problems, on many levels. The significance of this series cannot be overestimated, not even if it admittedly has mistakes and defects. What's certain is that we are trying to do our best.
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