Works for Violin and piano Volume i

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Béla BartÓk

Béla BartÓk Works for Violin and piano Volume 1

Romanian Folk Dances (1925 – 26) (5:23) Transcription for violin and piano by Zoltan Szekely of Romanian Folk Dances, BB 68 (1915) for solo piano

1 I Joc cu bata (Stick Dance) (1:20) 2 II Braul (0:29) 3 III Pe loc (In One Spot) Andante (1:04) 4 IV Buciumeana (Dance of Bucium) (1:20) 5 V Poargaromaneasca (Romanian Polka) (0:33) 6 VI Maruntel (Fast Dance) (1:01)

Rhapsody No. 1, BB 94a (1928, revised 1929)

Dedicated to Joseph Szigeti

7 I “Lassù” Moderato (4.07)8 II “Friss” Allegro moderato (5.22)

Sonata No. 2, for Violin and Piano BB 85 (1922) Written for Jelly d’Aranyi

9 I Molto moderato (8:50)10 II Allegretto (12:33)

Rhapsody No. 2, BB 96a (1928, revised 1945)

Dedicated to Zoltan Szekely

11 I “Lassù” – Moderato (4.42)12 II “Friss” – Allegro moderato (6.28)

Hungarian Folk Tunes (1926 – 27) (7:41) Transcription for violin and piano by Joseph Szigeti and the composer of seven pieces from For Children, BB 53 (1908 – 10) for solo piano

13 I (4:12)

Book II No. 28 Parlando Book I No. 18 Andante non molto Book II No. 42 Allegro vivace

14 II (2.05)

Book II No. 33 Andante sostenuto Book I No. 6 Allegro

15 III (2:05)

Book I No. 13 Andante Book II No. 38 Poco vivace

Produced and engineered by Sergei Kvitko. Assistant audio engineer Vitaly Serebriakov.Recorded in June 2013 at Blue Griffin’s Studio The Ballroom. This cd was recorded with funding from Drake University.

notably Schoenberg and Stravinsky, as well as late Debussy. Even as he turns to certain techniques of Schoenberg’s, such as avoiding octave doublings and note repetitions within consecutive chords, he continues to draw heavily on the folk idioms he encountered during his field work, including particular melodic configurations that give the perfect fourth primacy, and certain rural fiddling techniques which would not translate over to the piano. His indebtedness to folk material is also apparent in the two-movement lassú-friss form, typical of the verbunkos-style instrumental dance music of 19th century Hungary. The meeting of these two impulses, that of a modernist musical language freed from the strictures of western tonality and a commitment to folk-based rhythmic and melodic structures, makes Bartók’s writing stand apart. While his piano works tend to be dominated by single-movement character pieces, his violin works all fall into the more “traditional” genres of the sonata, the concerto, and the rhapsody (the 44 Duos standing as one of the major exceptions). The violin works were also written almost exclusively for Bartók’s close friends, including Jelly d’Aranyi, Zoltan Szekely, and Jósef Szigeti. In contrast to the piano works, which he generally wrote to perform himself, many of his violin works were “offerings” to his friends, rather than pieces that were explicitly commissioned by performers. The earliest of these “offerings” were the first two violin sonatas, both dedicated to d’Aranyi. In the early 1920s, Bartók was deeply engrossed in his ethnographic work, transcribing the hundreds of folk tunes he had collected with his partner Zoltan Kodaly. He was also active on the concert circuit, travelling across Hungary and Transylvania, and then to Britian, France, and Germany in 1922. Bartók had known d’Aranyi since she was a young girl studying at the Budapest Academy of Music, where he taught piano to her sister Hortense. Both Jelly and her sister began touring Europe at a young age, where their musical skill as well as their sparkling

Bela Bartók was born on March 25, 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Romania). The oldest of two children, Bartók showed musical promise from a young age, receiving his first piano lessons at age five and impressing his musically-inclined parents with his ear for rhythm and precocious compositions, the earliest of these dating from when he was nine years old. He entered the Academy of Music in Budapest in 1899, focusing on piano performance and composition. After completing his studies at the Academy in 1903, Bartók freelanced as a pianist and composer throughout Europe, and it was during this time he became more heavily invested in Hungarian folk song. In 1904, Bartók traveled to northern Hungary, and it was here he overheard a Transylvanian woman singing. This became an influential experience for Bartók, who notated the woman’s song, and then wrote to his sister, saying that he “had a new plan: to collect the finest Hungarian folksongs and to raise them…to the level of art-song.” His first ethnomusicological trips into rural Hungarian communities, occasionally accompanied by fellow Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly, began in 1906, with the first published results of these trips coming out in 1907. He continued to avidly transcribe and later record folksongs for many years, interrupted briefly by World War I. Following the war, Bartók began integrating atonal techniques into his folk-derived idiom, most noticeable in the First and Second Violin Sonatas from this period (1921 and 1922, respectively). And yet it is this convergence that makes Bartók’s music so difficult to pin down, as no one term accurately encapsulates the wide-ranging, even contradictory, aspects of his compositional style. While much of his earlier music draws on Romantic “gypsy” music in the style of Liszt or Brahms (significant ornamentation, rapid scalar passages, etc.), by the 1920s he has begun to integrate modernist trends from western European composers, most

Béla BartÓk music for Violin and piano

of the first for cello and piano at the request of cellist Pablo Casals. The premiere of the first Rhapsody was given in Budapest in November of 1929 by its dedicatee, Szigeti, with the composer at the piano. Like the Second Sonata, both rhapsodies feature a traditional Hungarian bipartite structure known as lassú-friss, or slow-fast. In these rhapsodies, Bartók interweaves various newly-composed melodies meant to closely resemble actual Eastern European melodies, particularly those from Hungarian, Romanian, and Ruthenian peoples. However, unlike the Second Sonata, the first rhapsody is much more tonal. The Romanian Folk Dances (1925–6) and Hungarian Folk Tunes (1926–7) were both original piano works, later arranged for violin by Szekely and Szigeti, respectively. Bartók performed these works in concerts with Szekely and Szigeti in New York on 5– 6 February 1928, and the enthusiastic reception of these works seems to have given Bartók the impetus to overcome his three-year-long “silent period,” and to begin work on the First Rhapsody for violin. During one of Bartók’s tours in England, Szigeti saw an opportunity for joint recordings featuring the violinist-arrangers and Bartók at the piano. Both the Romanian Folk Dances and the Hungarian Folk Tunes were recorded at Columbia’s Abbey Road studios in January of 1930, and were well received for their “odd flavor and neat build,” as a Gramophone review described them. This is one of the few professional recordings made of Bartók’s playing. Overall, these works show a general trend in Bartók’s composition, moving from the high modernist harmonic language of the early 1920s to the more folk-influenced, even Romantic tendencies of his later compositions. His strong interest in the folk traditions of his homeland, not only collecting and transcribing them but analyzing them as well, combined with his interest in Western European art music, helped to produce a tonal and structural language all his own. JENNA HARMON

personalities made them immensely popular. While on vacation in Budapest in the fall of 1921, d’Aranyi paid a visit to Bartók, and the two played together for the first time since she had left for England in 1913. Bartók was so stunned by her playing, he immediately went to work on the first of the two sonatas. After touring England with d’Aranyi (and several failed romantic overtures towards her), Bartók wrote and dedicated the second sonata to her. Their relations were sufficiently strained by this point, however, that d’Aranyi refused to premiere the work, and Imre Waldbauer instead gave the premiere in Berlin in February of 1923. Eventually they were able to reconcile their differences, and in the spring of that year, d’Aranyi gave her first performance of the work. The melodic structure can be heard as based on the hora lunga, or the “long-drawn” song specific to Transylvanian instrumental music. The hora lunga are completely improvised, but typically have three main parts: a long, sustained phrase with two opening notes; a flashy improvisatory section with significant embellishment; and a recitative-like portion centered on the final note. Bartók first encountered this style during his ethnographic studies in 1913, and its influence can be heard in the irregular melodic structure and significant ornamentation of the Second Sonata. This sonata is often seen as one of Bartók’s most “modern” or “difficult” works, and represents his deep engagement with Schoenberg’s practices. The First and Second Violin Rhapsodies (1928) followed a period of renewed composition in which Bartók also wrote his Third and Fourth String Quartets. They rhapsodies were written for fellow Hungarian musicians Jósef Szigeti and Zoltan Szekely, perhaps as reciprocation for their arrangements of his own music, including Szekely’s arrangement of the Romanian Folk Dances. He went on to create additional arrangements of the rhapsodies, including one with violin and orchestra, and another

Sarah Plum began her performing career by winning the first prize at the International Stulberg Competition in 1984. Since then she has carved out a distinctive role as a serious interpreter of a large range of music — commissioning many new works as well as crafting fresh interpretations of the standard repertoire. Sarah has been sought after by orchestras and fellow musicians in the US and Europe as a soloist, recitalist and chamber musician for concerts at venues and festivals such as the Luzern Festival, Ars Musica Brussels, Cite de Musique and the Barbican. Her performances have been praised as “consistently stunning with works that demanded conventional virtuosity but also great skill in unconventional techniques” (third coast journal) and “extraordinary, meaningful and magnificent music” (Berlin Tageszeitung). As a new music specialist Plum has tirelessly championed composers — commissioning, premiering and discovering new works while also bringing them to the attention of a larger public. This has brought her acclaim at noted festivals and venues such as Ankunft Neue Musik at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, New York City Electoacoustic Music Festival, 3rd Practice Festival, the Cube of the Moss Arts Center at the Institute for Creativity and Technology at Virginia Tech, Sonic Landscapes at California State University Fullerton and Unruly Music at the Marcus Center (Milwaukee), among others. In the past three years alone she has commissioned pieces from Sidney Corbett, Christopher Adler, Charles Nichols, Eric Lyon, Laurie Schwartz, Mari Kimura, Sidney Boquiren, Mari Takano and Jeff Herriot. In addition Plum has been invited to participate in residencies at universities such as UC Davis, Virginia Tech, UNC Greensboro, Montana State and San Francisco State where she performs, gives master classes and workshops student compositions.

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RIGHT: Sarah Plum and Timothy Lovelace / Photo by Tom Foley

Her long term collaborations with composers have led to projects such as her 2011 solo release Absconditus, Music for Violin of Sidney Corbett. This CD has been called “flinty and stark yet atmospheric” by music web, “ a gem” by the American Record Guide and Gramophone Magazine said that “Sarah Plum plays with a wealth of colour and a surprising range of sounds. Concurrent with the release of this Bartók CD Plum has also released a CD entitled Music for a New Century of world premiere recordings of two 21st century violin concertos from composers Christopher Adler and Sidney Corbett, one that she commissioned and the other she premiered. Plum has appeared on numerous TV and radio broadcasts including the WDR, NDR and Deutsche Welle in Germany, BBC TV in the United Kingdom and Iowa Public Radio. She has recorded for the Blue Griffin, Bridge, BMG, Albany, Arte Nova and Capriccio labels. Plum is Associate Professor of Violin and Viola at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Plum is a graduate of the Juilliard School where she received a BM and MM and SUNY Stony Brook where she received a DMA. Her major teachers were Joyce Robbins, Szymon Goldberg, Dorothy Delay, David Cerone and Lyman Bodman.

Pianist Timothy Lovelace heads the Collaborative Piano program at the University of Minnesota and is an active recitalist, having been featured at Rio de Janeiro’s Sala Cecilia Meireles, Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, Washington’s Kennedy Center, New York’s Merkin Concert Hall, Chicago’s Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts and on chamber music series sponsored by the symphony orchestras of Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Minnesota and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. As a soloist, he has performed with the Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vänskä. The roster of internationally-known artists with whom Lovelace has appeared includes Miriam Fried, Nobuko Imai, Robert Mann, Charles Neidich, Paquito D’Rivera, and Dawn Upshaw. For thirteen years, he was a staff pianist at the Ravinia Festival’s Steans Institute, where he played in the classes of Barbara Bonney, Christoph Eschenbach, Thomas Hampson, Christa Ludwig and Yo-Yo Ma, among others. A proponent of new music, Lovelace has performed the works of many living composers, and he presented the world premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s Third World. He has recorded for the Albany, Arabesque, Blue Griffin, Boston Records, and MSR labels. His principal teachers were Harold Evans, Gilbert Kalish, Donna Loewy, and Frank Weinstock.

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