Beethoven: Sonata # 9
in A Major, Op. 47 ("Kreutzer")
Bartok: Rhapsody # 1 for Violin and Piano
Debussy: Sonata for Violin and Piano in g minor
Bartok: Second Sonata for Violin and Piano
Joseph Szigeti, Violin
Bela Bartok, Piano
Library of Congress,
Washington, DC
April 13, 1940
Vanguard Classics OVC 8008
Most of us tend to think
of chamber music as a sterile affair in which refined musicians gently amuse a staid group
of corseted ladies and starched gentlemen amid lavish splendor. Pretty dull stuff. A few
minutes of this disc should forever demolish such an absurd myth.
This is, quite simply, one
of the greatest concerts ever recorded. Blazing with passion, it ranks right up there with
Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall, James Brown at the Apollo, the Allman Brothers at the
Fillmore, or your own sweat-drenched favorite. As with most such events, its supreme
quality arose from a unique confluence of forces, a single moment in time that would never
recur.
Joseph Szigeti, one of the
most acclaimed violinists of the century, was a fervent advocate of modern music. Bela
Bartok was not only an accomplished pianist but one of the most influential composers of
his era. Both were life-long friends, allied by their ardent nationalism and anti-fascism,
who emigrated to America. Szigeti came first. Bartok arrived on April 11, 1940. This
recital two days later was their first in the New World.
Both deeply loved their
native land. Each had devoted decades to collecting and perpetuating its musical
traditions and had become Hungary's greatest musicians. Although now physically safe in
America, they were keenly aware that the world they had left behind was on the brink of
extinction. It was with that crushing burden that they transplanted their culture to a
new, hopefully temporary home, in the symbolic form of a recital at the Library of
Congress, the shrine of intellectual freedom. (Although Szigeti lived until 1973, Bartok
would die in exile in New York in 1945, never again seeing his country.) Both the style
and the content of the recital seethed with emotional significance. This concert was
nothing less than a deeply personal plea for an entire culture that was about to
evaporate.
Both musicians were not
only ideal spokesmen and advocates for their national music but exemplified the entire
Eastern European approach to interpretation, perhaps the most viscerally exciting of all
classical performing traditions. Intonation, rhythm, dynamics and texture all become
wildly distorted to produce an uninhibited gypsyish emotional effect. While such stylistic
matters are hard to describe, the first minute of the Bartok Rhapsody will explain
this unbuttoned approach better than a thousand books.
The style is no longer
familiar and takes considerable adjustment for modern ears. At first, it sounds sour.
Fingers and toes can be exhausted in a matter of seconds keeping count of all the
"wrong" notes. But are they really wrong? Not at all. As with blue notes in jazz
or microtones in blues, this music yields to emotion. The bent notes are not mistakes, but
rather the expressive means by which the artists convey their unbounded feelings.
Admittedly, this is not
the accepted way to perform classical music. By what right do these performers so
arrogantly distort the published score? For two of the works performed here, the answer is
obvious: Bartok wrote them and considered Szigeti to be their foremost exponent. This disc
documents nothing less than the creator's legacy. Any differences between the score and
these unbridled preformances clearly yields to the latter as a living, breathing record of
the composer's intention.
Records such as these are
far more accurate than a written score to preserve and communicate to performers of the
future just what the composer wanted. The standardized signs used in our Western system of
notation become virtually meaningless to describe such instinctive artistry. (Indeed, the
intrinsic problem with all music notation is that it is utterly incapable of conveying the
human element.)
But what of the Beethoven?
Perhaps some of his music would be badly bruised by Bartok and Szigeti's impassioned
temperament, but not the Kreutzer. Written in 1803 amid fits of suicidal depression
over his advancing deafness, the first movement constantly fights the confines of its form
with explosive outbursts and forever changed the scope of chamber music, much as his
contemporaneous Eroica redefined the symphony. As if to emphasize the work's
revolutionary import, Bartok and Szigeti hurl themselves into the Kreutzer with
total abandon.
And Debussy? Well, it
takes one to know one. Although a generation and cultures apart, Debussy and Bartok were
pioneers of twentieth century music. This is clearly not a traditional, diffident French
performance of the mold ineffably stamped by Thibaud and Cortot in 1929 (on Biddulph LHW
006 or Pearl 9348). But Bartok and Szigeti's highly-charged approach is nonetheless
revelatory and highly valid, both on its own terms and as a sincere tribute from one great
composer to another.
Aside, of course, from the
Hungarian folk music which he transformed into strikingly modern conceptions, Bartok once
identified Bach, Beethoven and Debussy as his greatest influences. Although we have seem
to have none of his Bach, here we have Bartok's views of his other two great mentors,
together with the manner in which he melded their inspiration into two of his own
compositions. His Rhapsody is irresistably dance-like, while the Sonata # 2
is aggressively spiky. In a single evening, Bartok bequeathed us a stunning example of the
creative process.
The CD is derived from the
same acetates as the earlier issues on Vanguard VRS 1130/1 and Everyman SRV 304/5. While
surface noise is barely noticeable, the sound remains rather dim. But such considerations
hardly seem relevant. What we have here is not a quaint historical artifact of passing
interest but a direct window on perhaps the most fascinating classical performance
tradition of our century, fixed in time for one final moment just before it was to be
irreparably compromised by war and cosmopolitan influences. This is pure, unadulterated
ethnic music, every bit as raw and powerful as urban blues or gut-bucket jazz.
So if you think of chamber
recitals as pallid stuff, you owe it to yourself to hear this disc. It will broaden your
horizons, like hearing Robert Johnson or Jimi Hendrix after a lifetime of thinking the
Singing Nun was the height of guitar artistry.
Copyright 1995 by Peter
Gutmann
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