Bartok

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Cat No: 8556693

Release Date: 01 January 2001

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 730099669320

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: BARTOK

Description
Béla Bartók (1881-1945)The Best of Bartók The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was born in 1881 in a region that now forms part of Romania. His father, director of an agricultural college, was a keen amateur musician, while it was from his mother that he received his early piano lessons. The death of his father in 1889 led to a less settled existence, as his mother returned to work as a teacher, eventually making her home in Pozsony, the modern Bratislava, where Bart6k passed his early adolescence, counting among his school-fellows the composer Ernö Dohnányi. Offered the chance of musical training in Vienna, like Dohnányi he chose instead Budapest, where he won a considerable reputation as a pianist, being appointed to the teaching staff of the Academy of Music in 1907. At the same time he developed a deep interest, shared with his compatriot Zoltán Kodály, in the folk-music of his own and adjacent countries, later extended as far as Anatolia, where he collaborated with the Turkish composer Adnan Saygün.As a composer Bartók found acceptance much more difficult, particularly in his own country, which was, in any case, beset by political troubles, when the brief post-war left-wing government of Béla Kun was replaced by the reactionary régime of Admiral Horthy. Meanwhile his reputation abroad grew, particularly among those with an interest in contemporary music, and his success both as a pianist and as a composer, coupled with dissatisfaction at the growing association between the Horthy government and National Socialist Gennany, led him in 1940 to emigrate to the United States of America.In his last years, after briefly holding teaching positions at Columbia and Harvard, Bartók suffered from increasing ill-health and from poverty which the conditions of exile in war-time could do nothing to alleviate. He died in straitened circumstances in 1945, leaving a new Viola Concerto incomplete and a Third Piano Concerto more nearly finished. Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances, a reflection of his interest in folk-music and his great ability in using such melodic material so as to set it off in a new way, was conceived in 1915 for piano and is now equally well known in an arrangement for violin and piano and for solo violin and string orchestra. The short dances are Stick Dance, Sash Dance, In One Place, Horn Dance, Romanian Polka and a final rapid Maruntel.Bartók dedicated his Second Violin Concerto, completed in 1938, to the violinist Zoltán Székely, for many years leader of the Hungarian String Quartet. The slow movement is one of great beauty and tenderness, with a theme that is freely varied in the following six sections. The first of these has the soloist accompanied by timpani and double bass, the second expands the thematic material with intervention from the harp
Tracklisting