Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion

I just ran across this very nice performance of a unique piece by Bartók, the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. What is so unusual about this performance is that everyone is playing from memory, something you rarely see in chamber music, especially of this sort!

What is interesting about this piece is that he takes the idea of a sonata for piano and expands it to two pianos and then hugely expands the timbral range by using percussion to extend the sounds of the pianos.

Bartók and Folk Music

The rich traditions of folk and peasant music found in Eastern Europe were a lifelong preoccupation of Bartók. He was greatly aided in this project by the use of the Edison phonograph, which recorded on wax cylinders. Here is a photo of him recording Slovak folksongs. Bartók is fourth from the left:

Bartók's first expedition to collect Hungarian folksongs was in collaboration with Zoltan Kodály and in December 1906 they published a collection of twenty arranged for voice and piano. Here is an excerpt:

Bartók later wrote about the influence of this music in his autobiography:

The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work, because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive (pentatonic) scales, and the melodies were full of most free and varied rhythmical phrases and changes of tempi... [quoted in Antokoletz, The Music of Béla Bartók, p. 26]

Another example: six Romanian Folk Dances arranged for violin and piano:

 Of course, Bartók both transformed these basic materials and combined them with many other elements such as the church modes on various pitch levels, expanding modes by ordering them into perfect fifth progressions, and using whole tone scales and polymodal chromaticism. We can find examples of these in his 14 Bagatelles of 1908 where he absorbs the folksong influence into original compositions:

Introduction to Béla Bartók

My love and appreciation for specific composers tends to wax and wane, always in a bit of a flux. This is partly because I am constantly renegotiating my relationship with music. Over the years I have been entirely captivated by composers that I am less enthusiastic about now: Steve Reich is an example. A contrary example is Mozart who I used to think was too "precious" but now I simply adore. Some composers I am perennially taken with like, of course, J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Shostakovich and Stravinsky (though the latter has gone up and down a bit in my estimation). I guess that, for me, the story never comes to an end: there are always new strengths and weaknesses to be discovered. Not in Bach, of course, but in most others!

For much of the time that I have been posting this blog I have not been a huge fan of Béla Bartók, finding his music often too gloomy and dark. This probably came from listening to so much Steve Reich who is often, let's admit it, pretty upbeat. But I find myself leaning more and more toward Bartók recently and I recognize that I haven't given him a fair shake on the Music Salon. Years and years ago I did a post titled The Case of Bartók where the praise was rather half-hearted. Let me try and make up for that by doing several posts on Bartók and revealing what is really remarkable about his music.

But first let's have just a taste of his musical style. This is his well-known Allegro barbaro, composed in 1911 when he was thirty years old:

Why does Bartók's music have such a different flavour from other European music of the time? It partly has to do with the place of Hungary in European history. The Magyars are a people originating in Central Asia that only arrived in Europe late in the 9th century, among the last of the great migrations occurring from the end of the Roman Empire to the emergence of Western Europe from the Dark Ages. They were, therefore, considered by their neighbors to be somewhat "barbaric" in their language and customs. Hungarian is not related to other European languages but is a member of the Ugric language family associated with peoples in Western Siberia.

As we can hear in the piano piece, Hungarian music can have a fiery passion that is at odds with the more calm music of Central Europe. Bartók himself was fascinated with the folk music of Hungary and from his early thirties he devoted considerable amounts of time to the study and collection of folk music not only from Hungary but from Rumania, Bulgaria and even as far as Turkey. He discovered rhythmic and harmonic resources very different from the education in Western European theory he received from the Budapest Academy of Music.

Not to get too bogged down in details, but elements such as modal folksong, harmony based on fourths and irregular meters like 7/4 and 11/8 from Bulgarian folk dance soon found a place in his music. He often created settings for folk songs that combined modal melody with chromatically contrasting accompaniments.

Bartók studied piano with a student of Franz Liszt and was a virtuoso player. He wrote three formidably challenging piano concertos that synthesized a number of influences. Here is the Piano Concerto No. 1 in a spectacular performance with Yuja Wang as soloist and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Swedish Radio Orchestra. One of the most bad-ass piano concertos you are ever likely to encounter!

Friday Miscellanea

These days are whirling by and I am not finished my post on Bartók yet. I'm finding the Antokoletz book on Bartók to be a challenging read. But it will get posted sooner or later! And then I think I will do a few more on Bartók who has not gotten a very full treatment here. On to today's miscellanea. First up, a little video from YouTube:

You can't fault his enthusiasm, I suppose, but one particular trend I notice lately is the embarrassing mugging for the camera that so many YouTubers think they have to engage in. The expression on this gentleman's face shows a level of enthusiasm about equal to that of an eighteen-year-old boy on being offered oral sex for the first time!

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Here's an odd item from Slipped Disc: AMERICA INFLICTED STEINWAYS ON THE WORLD

Reader’s Comment of the Day from Bernard Chevilly in Orléans, France:

Steinway & Sons pianos are in almost every concert hall in the world because the Allies imposed them after World War II. The most prestigious European concert grand piano was, until then, the C. Bechstein, but the Bechstein family, since the early 1930s, were close to Adolf Hitler (Helene Bechstein wanted to marry Hitler to her daughter) and therefore Nazis. The Soviets and the Americans reduced the Bechstein factory in Berlin to ashes in 1945. The Steinway, an American piano of ancient German origin (Heinrich Steinweg), but genuinely “American”, was then produced in Hamburg. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Steinways gradually took over all concert halls in Europe and, by extension, on other continents. To conclude: the massive presence of the Steinway & Sons, manufactured with the unconditional financial support of the USA in Germany, was a political decision, totally unrelated to music. This is why major brands such as Fazioli, Bösendorfer or Steingraeber & Söhne cannot compete at all in the world market for concert pianos.

How true is this? The last piano recital I viewed in Wigmore Hall was played on a Fazioli and Bösendorfer pianos are quite common--in Europe at least.

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In an Ironic Plot Twist, Culture Workers Occupying Theatres in France Are Now Blocking the Reopening of Venues:

Culture venues can finally reopen to the public in France after months of lockdown. But arts workers who have been occupying theaters in protest against pandemic-related closures say their needs have still not been met—and many won’t leave, preventing some theaters from reopening.

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There seems to be a trend to concerts returning sans intermission:  What to do when nature calls — and there’s no intermission?

in the expansive new season at Lyric: all of the fall operas were to be recast as one-act experiences, performed without intermission. To achieve this goal, Lyric said, it even planned to make some artistic compromises and reduce the running times so that no opera would run more than two and a half hours.

That is going to involve some serious cuts in many operas. 

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Four in 10 musicians could leave Britain over EU touring fears – poll

More than 40% of musicians polled about their work in the European Union said they would consider relocating to continue accessing jobs, with a fifth contemplating changing career entirely.

As well, it could be years before we even realize how much damage the pandemic did to the performing arts.

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Ok, here is our quirky bit for the day, and it's about guitar lessons.

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William Deresiewicz has just about the best discussion of the arts before and during the catastrophe of COVID: Stages of Grief.

The pandemic will likely extinguish thousands of artistic careers. And the devastation will extend to the businesses and institutions that connect artists to audiences. The big players with deep pockets—Live Nation, the mammoth concert, ticketing, and artist-management company, or Gagosian, which operates galleries in seven countries—will survive. The entities that founder will be the smaller ones—mid-tier galleries, independent music venues—the kind that are crucial for helping emerging artists gain exposure, for sustaining serious creators and performers who won’t or can’t sell out to the commercial mainstream, and for keeping alive the spirit and soul of the arts.

But there have been beneficiaries, oh yes:

But the most frightening prospect is precisely the degree to which this crisis has entrenched and extended the power of the platforms: Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook; YouTube, which is part of Google; and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Because it is that power that is ultimately behind what has been happening to artists. Art hasn’t really been demonetized. For the companies reaping the clicks and streams, free content is a bonanza. Along with Spotify and a few other players, the tech giants are diverting tens of billions of dollars a year away from creators and toward themselves. They have been able to do so only because of their size, which has given them leverage over labels, studios, publishers, publications, and above all, independent artists, and because of the influence it has given them in Congress. And while almost every other sector has been suffering, the pandemic has functioned like a hormone injection for Big Tech. At the start of 2020, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft—the Big Five—had a combined market value of just under $5 trillion. By the end of the year, that already terrifying figure had grown to more than $7.5 trillion.

The whole essay is well-worth reading.

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For our envoi today an interesting and varied program by Mishka Rushdie Momen recorded last month at Wigmore Hall. She is playing on a Steinway, but Angela Hewitt, who also just did a recital at Wigmore, played on a Fazioli.

David Russell Concert

I'm not sure that David Russell has ever gotten the recognition he deserves. A very fine guitarist with a normally quite conservative repertoire, in this program, just premiered on YouTube last month, he explores some interesting repertoire including a new suite written for David by Stephen Goss. The concert was taped in three different churches on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostella.

Friday Miscellanea

Our quirky item of the day is Wynton Marsalis jamming on a French horn, an instrument he doesn't really play.

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The UK is open for live concerts once again: LSO/Rattle review – a spine-tingling reminder of the live sounds we have missed.

If ever a musical occasion mattered more than the music itself, here it was. Social distancing meant the hall could not be completely full on Tuesday afternoon for the London Symphony Orchestra’s post-pandemic return. But the mere public address announcement “Welcome back to the Barbican Hall” drew loud and prolonged cheering from the LSO’s first audience in 14 months, as well as answering applause and waving from the players themselves. For everyone, it was good to be back.

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HAMBURG REOPENS ITS HALLS

Both the Elbphilharmonie and the Laeiszhalle will reopen on 31 May in light of falling Covid numbers.

Audience members will have to show proof of vaccination, or a recent negative Covid test, or proof of their recovery from the virus.

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How Did They Make That?

A fascinating article on how musical instruments get made with clips from YouTube:

Some scholars argue that bone and ivory flutes are the very earliest of tonal musical instruments, with examples from as long as 43,000 years ago. The videos in this show the making of a simple end-blown kaval, a Baroque flute, modern flute, clarinet, and bassoon. You’ll note that the process of whittling a few holes in a hollow bone or stick has evolved dramatically over the years. Finally, as every double-reed player knows, reed-making is an essential skill, but few of us have seen the process from start to finish. Here's a glimpse.

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And for the pessimists among us: Stages of Grief: What the pandemic has done to the arts

It doesn’t take a Leonardo-level intellect to figure out that the pandemic has been devastating for the arts economy. Live events were the first things to stop, and they will be the last to return. That means musicians, actors, and dancers, plus all the people who enable them to take the stage—playwrights and choreographers, directors and conductors, lighting designers and makeup artists, roadies, ushers, ticket takers, theater managers—have no way to make a living from their work, and haven’t for more than a year.

Still, I don’t think most of us appreciate just how bad things are. The crisis goes well beyond the performing arts. Surveys published last summer found that 90 percent of independent music venues were in danger of closing for good, but so were a third of museums. In a survey by the Music Workers Alliance, 71 percent of musicians and DJs reported a loss of income of at least 75 percent, and in another, by the Authors Guild, 60 percent of respondents reported losing income, with an average drop of 43 percent. During the third quarter of 2020, unemployment averaged 27 percent among musicians, 52 percent among actors, and 55 percent among dancers. In the first two months of the pandemic, unemployment in the film and sound-recording industries reached 31 percent. Meanwhile, as of September, gallery sales of modern and contemporary art were down by 36 percent. What has been happening across the arts is not a recession. It is not even a depression. It is a catastrophe.

There is a lot more in the article, so I recommend reading the whole thing.

In 1982, the top 1 percent of musicians earned 26 percent of concert revenue. By 2017, the top 1 percent earned 60 percent. And so it is across the arts: the bestseller lists are dominated by a shrinking number of authors and books; the box office, by an endless procession of big-budget, mega-grossing franchises. And in the visual-art world, as of 2018, just twenty individuals accounted for 64 percent of global sales by living artists. Aside from stars and superstars, nearly everyone is making do with less.

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For our envoi, here is Simon Rattle conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in the Symphony No. 9 by Anton Bruckner:

Forqueray - Rondeau

I'm deceiving you a bit with the title. This is not a rondeau by Forqueray, this is La Portugaise by Forqueray performed by Jean Rondeau. I used to have Gustav Leonhardt's album of Forqueray which was lovely. But this is the first time I have heard a performance as good. Great playing. No, it is not a rondeau. It is in binary repeated form with some minuet in its genes.

I'm working on a large post about the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by Bartók, but it isn't ready yet. Those analytical posts take more time!