“Anyone who met Bartók and was aware of the primordial rhythmic power of his music was sur- prised by the slender, fragile form of the man. He had the outward appearance of a delicate, sensi- tive scholar,” wrote the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher. Born in the small Hungarian town of Nagyszentmiklós (now Sânnicolau Mare in Romania), Béla Bartók was an exceptional phenomenon in many respects. It was around 1905 that he first heard Magyar peasant music, and it impressed him deeply. From then on, he began collecting old songs and dances from Hungary and Romania on his trips (later also from Slovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria and the Arabic countries). He had the country peo- ple perform them and wrote them down himself. In the process, he discovered age-old folk music which had quite a different sound than the syn- thetic folklore propagated in the cities, which had been influenced by Franz Liszt (Hungarian Rhapso- dies) or Johannes Brahms (Hungarian Dances).
“Simple, frequently rough, but never stupid,” was the impression made by this peasant music on Bar- tók. He also found “no indication of chords stereotypically connected to the major-minor tonal system.” This folk art “which, despite its emphatic power, was entirely free of sentimentality and superuous ornamentation,” became a fundamental part of his expressionistic tonal language. One might say that Bartók drew only “from the clearest springs”, as the end of his Cantata profana (1930) so eloquently avows. Tanja Becker-Bender and Péter Nagy therefore undertook an intensive study of this sort of folklore and its instrumental techniques before making this recording.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario