article 145: BARTÓK PLAYS BARTÓK, or A Postscript to Article 142 The big Hungaroton LP-box mentioned in Article 142 continues to yield delights; the master’s no-nonsense performances of his own works never fail to impress. It even yielded a small insight into what might be considered historical performance practice – one which, in addition, gave me a feeling of self-justification after some 40 years. Bartók composed two sonatas for violin and piano in 1921-2. They were dedicated to Jelly d’Arányi, a great-niece of Joseph Joachim and dedicatee of Ravel’s “Tzigane”. Her teacher was Jenö Hubay, with whom Brahms premiered his D-minor Sonata in Budapest (1888). No. 2 was Bartók’s favorite. He claimed it was in C-major, but the only time any clear tonality appears is in the final chord, a C-major triad. It must have been a kind of joke, because the whole piece, termed “expressionistic” by one writer, is the most atonal of any of his works I have come across. On this first hearing I didn’t care for it at all. The way Bartók careens in and out and glances off of tonal zones in so many of his works is, to my mind, one of his greatest accomplishments. About this piece, the dreaded Adorno wrote (1925), “Bartók courageously tends towards anarchy.” Germany discovered what anarchy got them in the latter part of the 20th century. On 13 April 1940, two days after Bartók arrived in his American exile, he played a concert at the Library of Congress with another Hubay student, his great countryman József Szigeti. The huge program (including Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” and the Debussy sonatas) was recorded with the institution’s own facilities, and was issued as a two-LP set by Qualiton (LPX 11373-74), Hungaroton’s predecessor. Vanguard took the set on license in 1965. What I am getting at here is an aspect of Bartók’s piano playing in the Sonata No. 2. He very slightly arpeggiates many chords which are not so marked. He does this not because they are too wide to be grasped at once, but to modulate and color the attack. It’s incredibly effective, if barely noticeable. An intelligent harpsichordist does exactly the same thing. It’s an indispensable means of softening the instrument’s sharp edges and showing beat values, which can be (and the Good Lord knows, often is) disastrously misused. In the decades back in the previous century when I was playing the fortepiano, I did it there too, striving for a similar variety of attack. It is not for me to judge how successful I was, but one Dutch critic wrote that my use of the technique was oubollig. This word, in its most elementary sense, means “old-fashioned”. The connotation is “corny”, or “un-hip”. It was not a condemnation of my playing, but of the use of slight arpeggiation per se. One can imagine how I bristled. There is obviously no way of knowing whether Mozart or Beethoven played like that, but Bartók was a great-great-grand-pupil of Beethoven’s, via Czerny, Liszt and Thomán. Far from being un-hip, might it in fact be…HIP? December 3, 2024 - back -