Andras Bach - Bartok: Complete Works for Piano Solo - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Masaaki Suzuki - Keyboard Works II [COMPACT DISCS] date 11/19/1996

In the years since the acclaimed recordings made by the Hungarian pianist Zoltán Kocsis back in the 1980s and 90s, no single pianist has attempted to record a complete edition of Bartók's works for solo piano! For a quarter of a century, no new comprehensive perspective on this multifaceted oeuvre has been cast, an important and varied, yet internally cohesive body of work that displays so many different aspects of Bartók's creativity. This is exactly what the German pianist Andreas Bach has set out to achieve - Inch... to find the young Bartók in the late works as well as the late Bartók in the early works. And (...) create a recording that presents a Bartók different from those usually encountered and which are by contrast, 'middle-of-the-road'. Emphasizing Inchnot only the rhythmic and folkloric content, but also providing an opportunity to discover Bartók's harmonic thinkingInch, an aspect of the composer's language that few fans had the opportunity to appreciate before. Volume1 of this new complete edition presents individual works that Bartók composed in his mature, personal style, including the Sonata, the Sonatina, the Suite op. 14, and the 14 Bagatelles; folk music influences are present but only as distant references. The next 4 CDs will focus on the InchRomantic BartókInch and will include his early works, compositions written early in his career and still showing influences of 19th century Romantic idiom. CD 5 InchBartók and Folk MusicInch is dedicated to his works, and arrangements most directly influenced by folk music. The remaining CDs (Vols. 6-8) are devoted to the major cycles InchFor ChildrenInch and InchMikrokosmos Inch.

Béla Bartók's monumental Mikrokosmos, containing 153 mainly short InchprogressiveInch piano pieces composed between 1932 and 1939, is both a very special piano method and a collection of wonderfully original performance pieces (the series actually contains almost the complete piano music by Bartók from the 1930s). Finally, it is also a detailed introduction to different aspects of his compositional style. With Mikro-kosmos, Bartók, who was generally reluctant to teach composition, created a veritable method of composition. A series of short piano pieces for the 1913 Piano Method jointly authored by Bartók and Sándor Reschofsky and published by Rózsa- völgyi in Budapest is the most immediate precursor of Bartók's magnum opus, the six-volume Mikrokosmos. In 1913, the composer's basic endeavor was to help produce a true modern piano school, in which all performance pieces and some easy exercises made up Bartók's contribution. The 48 little pieces by Bartók included five-finger exercises, easy contrapuntal pieces, occasional essays in different styles as well as a range of character pieces.