Cheap Bartok: Sonata for Two Pianos/Two Pictures/Preludio & Scherzo (Music) (Bela Bartok, Gusztav Cser, Zoltan Racz, Dezso Ranki, Zoltán Kocsis) Price

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Customer Reviews of Bartok: Sonata for Two Pianos/Two Pictures/Preludio & Scherzo

These are days when Frugality drives most of my shopping for compact discs. And there are a great many re-issues of terrific performances, offering excellent value-for-money, so that the musical result of this frugality need not be in any way an embarrassment. So it is that I seldom buy discs with less than an hour's worth of music, if there is a good alternative.

So, with this disc, I made the pointedly un-frugal decision to pay full price for fifty minutes of music. To put even this in proper perspective, though, I sought this disc out because of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, essentially a half hour of music ... for the arrangements of Two Pictures, and of two of the Four Orchestral Pieces, I did not know at all, and I figured they must be pleasant pieces, but not la crème de Bartók.

So, the bullet was bitten, and full price paid for half an hour of la crème, gloriously executed. In fact, this is a live performance, so an already-exciting piece was given in what must have been a riveting concert experience. Happily, too, the arrangements are fine pieces as well, so for all my economical foot-dragging, this was a risk well worth the taking.

Edgard Varèse famously refused to submit himself only to sounds that had "already been heard." Bartók could have made exactly the same claim, only with added pride at drawing new sounds and textures from media for which centuries of great composers had already furnished a formidable literature: in particular, the string quartet, and for the piano.

Furthermore, while Varèse wrote the first music which was officially for nothing but percussion instruments ("Ionisation," which, while it includes a piano, uses it only as a sort of percussive blur), Bartók is his superior in writing in a really vital, compelling manner for percussion instruments (in addition to this Sonata, I think of the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta).

Bartók's brilliantly novel use of the piano, and his frenetic-but-always-well-shaped writing for percussion, make this Sonata one of his greatest contributions to the literature - beating out a crowded field of his finest work, including six masterful string quartets and three equally distinct piano concerti.

The atmosphere of this piece is fantastic, inimitable, richly tinted; this performance is tight, yet bristling.

Seems a small detail, but the percussionists never out-shout the pianos, the balance is always good, dynamic, and especially crescendi and diminuendi, are always an unnering part of the unfolding musical drama.

Of the Two Pictures: "In Full Flower" is Bartók in modo Debussy, which is a great combination ... in fact, it makes the two-piano arrangement a more perfect homage to the Hungarian composer's French model, recalling the latter's two books of Preludes for piano. "Village Dance" is a solid portrait of the folksy Bartók.