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Is Bartók still a Hungarian composer? The
question is raised by the first releases in
an astonishing recording project, the
Bartók New Series, which is coming out on
the revivified Hungaroton label—or,
rather, that question is raised not so much
by the releases themselves (which answer
it powerfully in the affirmative) as by the
notion of a complete recorded edition as a
domestic endeavour, involving a Hungarian
company and, at least so far,
exclusively Hungarian artists. Surely, one
might think, Bartók has long been a
universal figure, needing no promotion
from his home country’s National Cultural
Fund (the main sponsor of the series,
according to its informative website,
bartoknewseries.com) and not
necessarily benefitting from being
confined to his compatriots among
performers.
However, the universe has not been
too clever in recognizing its treasures. For
instance, the Two Pictures for orchestra
have been recorded over the years by
innumerable conductors of Hungarian
origin, from Eugene Ormandy and Antal
Doráti to Ádám Fischer and Zoltán Kocsis,
but the only non-Hungarians to have
committed themselves to this score in
recent times would seem to be Pierre
Boulez (the solitary foreign conductor to
have recorded a lot of Bartók’s works,
many of them twice), Riccardo Muti and
James Conlon. The example could be
multiplied: most of the songs and
choruses, as well as important early
compositions, have not been recorded
since the last complete edition Hungaroton
put out, forty years ago. There are, of
course, works that are solidly placed in
the international repertory: the quartets,
the concertos, the Music for Strings,
Percussion and Celesta, Bluebeard’s
Castle and The Miraculous Mandarin. But
much of Bartók remains Hungarian by
default, as performers from elsewhere
hesitate to approach music they feel
requires local knowledge. Hungarian
musicians are thus left in charge, and
perhaps the indisputable quality of their
performances in so many cases has at
least as much to do with familiarity as
with the possession of some intangible
connection to their national ‘heritage’.
Yet one must pause, since there is one
thing that decidedly and indissolubly links
Hungary’s performing musicians with the
country’s great composer: the fact of
having Hungarian as a mother tongue.
For though vocal music represents a
rather small proportion of the output—
seven out of the thirty-one CDs in the new
series are occupied by it—Bartók often
has his instruments speaking, or singing,
in Hungarian, as Kocsis, the new series’s
performing mastermind, has observed:
I think music exceeds language. Yet at the
same time language remains important...
I can’t imagine the Music for Strings,
Percussion and Celesta or the Divertimento
without some connection with language
being present in the performance.
And again:
Most of the piano works require you to be
Hungarian or Eastern European.
It might be hard even for a Hungarian
speaker to say what Kocsis has the
players of the Hungarian National
Philharmonic Orchestra singing in his
recording of the two aforementioned
orchestral works (HSACD 32510), yet
certainly they seem to be singing
something, with intensity and point.
Tempo has a lot to do with this. Where the
first movement of the Music for Strings is
nearly always done rather more slowly
than the composer indicated, both in his
metronome marking and in the duration
he gave for this movement in the score,
Kocsis takes the composer at his word
(or, rather, at his number) and thereby
finds in this music an extraordinary
panting anxiety. This is, it must be said,
no longer an ‘Andante tranquillo’, as
Bartók called it in spite of his numerical
indications, but as an ‘Andante nervoso’ it
seems to be telling the music’s powerful
and disturbing truth. The fact that it
clocks in at excellently the composer’s
prescribed length of 6’ 30” may be a token
of its veracity. When it comes to the finale,
Bartók’s 5’40” is unlikely to be attained
on this planet, and Kocsis’s players show
some signs of rush in getting to the end in
6’ 27”. Nevertheless, this is altogether a
driving and fully expressive performance
of one of Bartók’s central masterpieces,
coupled with a cheering account of the
relatively overlooked Divertimento and
with a beautifully fresh and engaging
performance of the Hungarian Sketches—
a minor work, no doubt, but one that
turns out here to have a lot of typically
Bartókian comedy and character.
The same point about language is made
time and again by the recordings for the
new series of the quartets (HSACD 32513-
14), works that must hold a key position in
any Bartók project, and that here are
presented at a supreme level by a group of
distinguished Hungarian artists who now
play together as the Mikrokosmos Quartet:
Gábor Takács-Nagy, Zoltán Tuska, Sándor
Papp and Miklós Perényi. These are
glorious names in the recent history of
chamber music, Takács-Nagy, for example,
being the founder leader of the Takács
Quartet, and Perényi a musician who has
been threading a warm and wonderful line
on his cello for almost half a century. By
the time these recordings were made, in
2008, they had been playing together for a
decade, with Bartók at the centre of their
repertory, which may be why they sound
so totally integrated. Somehow they
achieve that while being quite independent
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as musicians; for example, Takács-Nagy’s
rare delicacy—supported, never trammelled,
by his authority and exactness—
contrasts nicely with the more forthright
style of his fellow violinist Tuska (and one
notices how brilliantly Bartók creates
opportunities for two at the top of the
texture). But the great virtue of the
ensemble’s integration is that it is so
thoroughly integrated with the music,
that the musicians understand how these
quartets drive simultaneously along four
lines and along one, that every nuance
works to the dynamism of the whole, that
nothing seems to be speaking here but
the music itself.
No doubt for these players, as for
other Hungarian musicians, it is a close
association with Bartók’s works that has
done most to bring them to a peak of
attainment, but there is, too, this matter
of how the music expresses itself, and in
what language. On many occasions in
these performances one has the
impression that Judith is singing through
Takács-Nagy’s violin, or Bluebeard through Perényi’s cello—not just because
this is the same composer with certain
qualities of melodic style that will fold
over from one work into another, but
rather because Bartók’s imagination was
impregnated with the rhythms and
phrasing of the language he spoke, which
was also, of course, the language he
heard on many of his ethnological
expeditions. The Mikrokosmos Quartet
remind us that folksong is an art not of
abstract tones but of sung words, and
therefore that words will be inscribed into
any music, even instrumental music, that
takes folksong as its basis or model.
(Perhaps, therefore, the ideal performers
of Bartók’s music would have to be
polyglot speakers of Hungarian,
Romanian and Slovak, with touches of
Ukrainian and Arabic thrown in.)
Another striking feature of these
quartet recordings is how Bartók emerges
as great ancestor of the next Hungarian
generation, for swarming passages in
several of the quartets look forward to
Ligeti’s micropolyphony and sudden
outbursts to Kurtág’s grammar of gesture.
Very possibly we are dealing here not with
a gene line but with an inheritance
discovered by the heirs, who were exposed
to—and wanted to align themselves
with—Bartók more than any other forebear.
But again it is tempting to interpret
these alliances as partly linguistic,
facilitated by a shared language, with its
particularities of rhythm and stress.
This splendid album is one of the few in
the series, presently half-complete, not
to be touched by the musicianship of
Kocsis. The series’s six volumes of solo
piano music republish the outstanding
recordings he made for Philips in the
1980s and 1990s, with the addition of a
very few tidbits, and the two early
concertos—the Rhapsody, Op.1, and the
Scherzo, Op. 2—are also repeated from
recordings he made during that period,
with Iván Fischer and the Budapest
Festival Orchestra. Now they are offered
on a disc (HSACD 32504) with a new
recording of the ‘Stefi Geyer’ violin
concerto featuring Barnabás Kelemen as
soloist and Kocsis as conductor, with the
Hungarian National Philharmonic
Orchestra. Kocsis and this same team are
also responsible for the other orchestral
works, recorded in most cases at the
Palace of Arts in a sequence that began in
2005. Among the albums that have been
released so far, one (HSACD 32506)
includes the Dance Suite along with the
early Second Suite and some tangy
Romanian items.
Right from its start—the rolling and
skipping cello phrase sung out to harp
accompaniment at the opening of the
Second Suite—one can hear how a
closeness to language, spoken and sung,
is going to be important. Sound matters
here as much as rhythm. Bartók’s sense
of the bizarre or grotesque—vibrantly
present in Kocsis’s orchestral recordings,
without any ostentation—is helped by a
controlled rawness in the timbre,
especially of woodwind instruments. The
same is true of the music’s humour,
which is often inseparable from its
weirdness, in a rich combination of comic
and sinister. (One wonders if the
composer was a fan of the horror films of
his time.) These recordings also force
one to notice the importance to the
Bartókian mix of fugato, even in a work
as youthful as the Second Suite—how
the comedy of imitation is broadened
as different instrumental colours run
after one another. Works that might
easily be categorized as minor—the
Romanian Dance that Bartók based on
local types and the Romanian Folk
Dances he wrote as direct transcriptions—
bloom now with character.
So does the Dance Suite. Another
welded paradox comes out here, along
with, and linked to, the joining of
humour, uncanniness and learning: the
clasping together of rural and urban.
Bartók found his sources, of course, in
the countryside, and especially in remote
villages, where perhaps his recording
apparatus would have been seen as an
outlandish contraption. But this peasant
music gave him, among other things,
vigorous ostinatos that he could rework
as the music of city streets, as well as a
pentatonicism he could bring forward as
a relic of the primeval human past. What
he found in far-flung Transylvania turned
out to have immediate relevance to his
own experience as a man of Budapest.
This is the message of The Miraculous
Mandarin, but it is the message, too, of
the Dance Suite in Kocsis’s urgent
recording. As with the quartets, these
orchestral performances will set the
standard for some time to come. 
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