Bartok: Piano Sonata, Sz. 80 / Suite, Sz. 62 / 7 Sketches, Sz. 44

Description

Béla Bartók (1881-1945): Piano Music Volume 1Béla Bartók was born on 25th March, 1881, in the town of Nagyszentmiklós (now in Romania). He studied the piano and composition with László Erkel in Pozsony (now Bratislava), where contact with his older contemporary Ernö Dohnányi proved a decisive factor in his development. The successful première in 1904 of his symphonic poem Kossuth indicated his nationalist leanings, but it was not until he embarked on expeditions to collect folk-music, initially in collaboration with Zoltán Kodály, that his ideal of a stylistic fusion between traditional and created forms of music began to take hold.The pre-war years were difficult ones for Bartók, caught between Austro-German conformity and insular Hungarian nationalism. Not until 1917-18, with the successful premières of his stage-works The Wooden Prince and Duke Bluebeard's Castle, was he established as a leading composer in the soon-to-be-independent Hungary, only for his subsequent pantomime, The Miraculous Mandarin, to be rejected on account of its explicit scenario. During the 1920s and 1930s, Bartók consolidated his reputation with frequent performances in Western Europe, notably at festivals of the International Society for Contemporary Music, while his career as a concert pianist took him to North America. It was to the United States that he emigrated in 1940, having previously banned performances of his music in Hungary, in protest at the increasingly fascistic orientation of the military government. Ill health and financial worries dogged Bartók's remaining years, but the works he did complete, including the Concerto for Orchestra and Third Piano Concerto, show a new directness which assured them an immediate place in the repertoire. He died of leukaemia in New York on 26th September, 1945.Although the six string quartets (1909-39) and the series of orchestral works written in the 1930s and 1940s constitute the highpoint of Bartók's creative achievement, his substantial output of piano music covers almost the whole of his career, from the juvenilia of the 1890s, in which procedures derived from Liszt and Brahms are absorbed and rejected, to the mature works of the mid-1920s, culminating with the encyclopaedic six-volume manual in keyboard prowess, Mikrokosmos (1939).The year 1926 was a decisive one for Bartók. About to embark on a career as an international concert pianist, and having written nothing of significance since the Dance Suite three years earlier, he turned his attention to composing piano music which would define his current musical thinking to the outside world. The Piano Sonata and the suite Out of Doors evolved in tandem, rejected passages from the former finding their way into the latter.As completed, the Sonata represents a paradigm of the new classicism that Bartók had been working towards during the first