Bartok: Rhapsodies Nos. 1 And 2 / Piano Quintet

Description

Bela Bartok (1881-1945)First Rhapsody (Folk Dances)Second Rhapsody (Folk Dances)Andante (1902)Piano Quintet (1903-4)The Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was born in 1881 in an area that nowforms part of Romania. His father, director of an agricultural college, was akeen amateur musician, while it was from his mother that he received his earlypiano lessons. The death of his father in 18891ed to a less settled existence,as his mother resumed work as a teacher, eventually settling in the Slovakcapital of Bratislava (the Hungarian Pozsony), where Bartok passed his earlyadolescence, counting among his school-fellows the composer Erno Dohnanyi.Offered the chance of musical training in Vienna, like Dohnanyi he choseinstead Budapest, where he won a considerable reputation as a pianist, beingappointed to the teaching staff of the Academy of Music in 1907. At the sametime he developed a deep interest, shared with his compatriot Zoltan Kodaly,in the folk-music of his own and adjacent countries, later extended as far asAnatolia, where he collaborated in research with the Turkish composer AdnanSaygan.As a composer Bartok found acceptance much more difficult, particularly inhis own country, which was, in any case, beset by political troubles, when thebrief post-war left-wing government of Bela Kun was replaced by the reactionaryregime of Admiral Horthy. Meanwhile his reputation abroad grew, particularlyamong those with an interest in contemporary music, and his success both as apianist and as a composer, coupled with dissatisfaction at the growingassociation between the Horthy government and National Socialist Germany, ledhim in 1940 to emigrate to the United States of America.In his last years, after briefly held teaching appointments at Columbia andHarvard, Bartok suffered from increasing ill-health, and from poverty which theconditions of exile in war-time could do nothing to alleviate. He died instraitened circumstances in 1945, leaving a new Viola Concerto incompleteand a Third Piano Concerto more nearly finished. The years in America,whatever difficulties they brought, also gave rise to other importantcompositions, including the Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by theKoussevitzky Foundation, a Sonata for Solo Violin for Yehudi Menuhin and,in the year before he left Hungary, Contrasts, for Szigeti and BennyGoodman.The two Rhapsodies, originally for violin and piano, were both writtenin 1928, the year of Bartok's Fourth Quartet. Both Rhapsodies appearedin versions for solo violin and orchestra, possibly the composer's finalintention, and in versions for violin, viola and cello, with the first also in aversion in which the solo cello replaces the solo violin. The orchestral versionof the First Rhapsody, modestly scored, includes a cimbalom, for thefirst and only time in his compositions. Both works are in two movements, lass??followed by friss, as in the standard Hungarian dances, the verbunkos,or recruiting-dance, and the csardas.The lass?? of the First