The Bartók Album by the Muzsikás ensemble was presented at the Royal Festival Hall in London in November last year. The CD, on the Rykodisc label, is now in record shops from New York to Tokyo. The Hungarian version, released on the group's own label, was presented at the Budapest Spring Festival in March 1999, just after the ensemble and Márta Sebestyén was awarded the Kossuth Prize, Hungary's highest honour for the arts, in recognition of their work over a quarter of a century.

This latest Muzsikás recording, The Bartók Album, brings to life the composer's encounters with traditional folk music in the early part of his career; this it does, not as documentary pieces for the archives, but as living music. One of Bartók's principal sources was traditional music, and in the abundant literature on Bartók, around a thousand works according to the most recent bibliography, there are some seventy which deal with this subject. (That does not include those works which discuss Bartók's relationship with the various folk traditions—Hungarian, Romanian, Ruthenian, Slovak, and Arab—in the context of a more general biographical or analytical study.)1 However thorough an academic study may be, it remains on a theoretical plane since it sets out to compare Bartók's compositions with his transcriptions and collections of folk songs—and it is really only intended for a specialist readership. Thus it is a priceless experience to be able to listen to the music itself, the very music which caught Bartók's imagination and inspired him to compose and to reshape it.

In presenting the sources, this Muzsikás album is not breaking entirely new ground: some years ago the Jánosi Group released an album, Rhapsody: Liszt and Bartók Sources, which presented authentic versions of some of the popular folk tunes of the last century together with original Romanian and Hungarian peasant songs which Liszt and Bartók had incorporated into their work.2 This Muzsikás recording, however, goes one better and does something different in that it cites Bartók's process of working with traditional music at three different levels. First of all, it presents some original phonograph recordings from the archives of the Budapest Museum of Ethnography, the real original sources which give us the traditional folk music Bartók actually encountered at the time. The second level is their reconstruction of the original music in its live form, in other words, re-creating the music as it would have sounded at the time and, assuming the tradition was passed on in an unbroken line, how it would sound today. And finally on the third, and debatebly the highest level, there are some compositions by Bartók himself, thus documenting how the original music was metamorphosed at the hands of the composer.

[...]

Thanks to the catalogue of sources published by Vera Lampert in 1980, we now know that in 34 of Bartók's works (counting series of works as single items) he used a total of 313 folk songs as "quotes".5 The Bartók Album by Muzsikás sets out on the trail of these "quotes". Three folk songs form the centrepiece of the album; all three are taken from the series 44 Duets for Two Violins. These short pieces, written in 1931 at the request of the German violin teacher Erich Doflein, and originally intended specifically for teaching purposes, are based on Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, Ruthenian, Serb and Arab folk songs.

The 44 Violin Duets have a special place among Bartók's many and varied reworkings of folk songs. The majority of his compositions are written for piano, for an instrument whose character is completely alien to and inconceivable in the original folk music tradition; they therefore already clearly bear the mark of deliberate intervention or translation into classical musical form. The violin duets, meanwhile, retain the potential for recreating the original sound, since the interplay between two violins, particularly in Hungarian and Romanian folk music, is very common. For this reason, the thinking that went into the compiling of The Bartók Album is in itself praiseworthy: it has focused on works which faithfully reproduce the traditional tonal characteristics and fit seamlessly into a world of sound familiar to folk ensembles.

This is not to say that Bartók's intention in the duets was to reproduce the fiddle-playing of folk musicians, indeed far from it. The original sources on which the majority of the 44 Duets were based are sung melodies, which in itself suggests that the composer must have made substantial changes to the material. But we can learn more about this transformation, if we consider the artful way in which the two violin themes develop together, their contrapuntal interplay and their "classical" refinement. This explains why pieces originally written for teaching purposes are played willingly by the world's great violinists as part of their concert repertoire. Indeed, the Muzsikás group accepted the commission to record the three Bartók duets only when they succeeded in persuading the great London-based violinist and string quartet leader, Alexander Balanescu, to participate in the project. (It is to the ensemble's credit that they were able to provide a partner worthy of Balanescu in the person of Muzsikás's own first violinist, Mihály Sipos.)

The original for the first piece selected from the series of duets (Sz. 28) was recorded on phonograph by Bartók himself in 1907 in the village of Felsőiregh in the Tolna region. Ignác Vörös, a 50-year-old peasant, sang onto the wax cylinder the slow folk song which begins, "Pej paripám rézpatkója de fényes" (My bay horse has shiny brass shoes). Based on this song, Bartók composed the violin duet which bears the title Bánkódás (Sorrow). The second piece is also from Bartók's own collection, recorded in the village of Patrova in the Máramaros region in 1913; on the phonogram two Romanian girls sing the song in Romanian. Number 32 in the series of duets, Máramarosi tánc (Máramaros Dance), is based on this melody. The third piece is duet number 44, which bears the title Erdélyi tánc—Ardeleana (Transylvanian Dance); the original source for this was recorded for the phonograph by a Gypsy violinist in 1912 in the village of Petrovasile in Torontál County.

It goes without saying that the value of the original phonograms themselves is that of historical curiosities, since the recordings made between 1907 and 1913 on wax cylinders, and which can only be marginally improved using modern techniques, are a highly distorted version of how the original music must have sounded. The unique value of this album lies in its second level, in the authentic rendering of the folk music itself. This in turn is the product of long dedicated years on the part of Muzsikás, studying the styles, techniques and character of this music, immersing themselves over and over again in the original sources—the product, in short, of a great deal of deliberate effort and much natural talent. These pieces are not simply "modernized" versions of the original recordings, but suggestive reconstructions of the melodies, and at the same time they are presented in several versions.