Bela Bartok
Piano Works
Piano Works
This set of two CD's presents a selection from Bartók's varied piano oeuvre. It is a combination of performances by pianists András Schiff and Zoltán Kocsis and historical recordings of the composer himself. No ifs, no buts: this is the best Bartok playing money can buy. Kocsis and Schiff, the foremost current Hungarian pianists, are keyboard antipodes, one dazzling and aggressive, the other cuddly and introspective. When he reads the notation Allegro Barbaro, Kocsis stops shaving; in the 1926 piano sonata his brutal note clusters will break windows in your nearest gated village. Schiff, all cufflinks and charm, is slyly seductive in the Dance Suite, wistfully lyrical in the Rumanian folk dances and Hungarian peasant songs. These recitals, taped in Japan, are new to Europe; they leave all others standing. The second CD is of Bartok himself playing selections from the six books of Mikrokosmos, from recordings he made on arrival in New York in 1940, after fleeing fascist repression in Hungary. The masters, gathering dust in a Columbia vault, have never been readily available and the freshness of this transfer defies belief. Bartok could be sitting in your own living room, smoking his way through divided arpeggios. The best that money can buy? A rare opportunity to hear Bartók play his own compositions. Recordings of Bartók made in London and New York in 1937 and 1940 respectively.