Bartók: Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion & other piano music

A welcome return to the piano music of Béla Bartók and a programme which includes the popular Sonatina, the aggressively experimental Op 18 Études and the Piano Sonata of 1926, the composer’s ‘year of the piano’. Cédric Tiberghien is then joined by François-Frédéric Guy, Colin Currie and Sam Walton for the Sonata for two pianos and percussion—a high-spirited conclusion to this successful mini series.
Bartók visited Csík County in 1907, when Transylvania, the region in which it lay, was still part of the Kingdom of Hungary. He had recently fallen in love with the young violinist Stefi Geyer, to whom he would dedicate his first violin concerto, and it was from her house that he set off by train on 1 July for a two-month tour collecting folk music. Among the enormous number of melodies he found in the area, where ethnic Hungarians known as Székelys predominated, were three little tunes played to him in August 1907 by Áron Balog on a peasant flute. Bartók’s Three Hungarian Folksongs from the Csík District are uncomplicated settings of these tunes, largely retaining the beautiful melodies (the first two slow and in a flexible tempo, the third faster and more regular) in their original configuration with simple accompaniments in the left hand. The second and third numbers are decorated versions of songs: alternately ‘Sír a kis galambon’ (‘When my little dove weeps’), which holds pride of place as the first tune in Bartók’s monograph The Hungarian Folk Song and in which the singer asks his mother why she will not let him marry ‘this little maiden’; and ‘Októbernak, októkbernak elséjen’ (‘October, the first of October’), which comments that ‘there’s no sunshine on the meadows of Csíkkarczfalva’ as the protagonist sets off to leave the birds, trees and girls of the village.
Composed in 1915 in three movements, the concise Sonatina has proved one of Bartók’s most popular works, particularly in the orchestral version called Transylvanian Dances. The five authentic folk tunes employed were collected in Transylvania between February 1910 and April 1914 and are again treated very straightforwardly with little artifice on the composer’s part. The opening movement, ‘Bagpipers’, is a ternary-form piece in D major drawing on the performances of two Romanian pipers—Demian Păvăloňi from Feresd in Hunyad County for the first tune, and Nicolai Bortiș from Vaskohmező in Bihar County for the second. The opening melody, which is slowed down significantly in Bartók’s arrangement, is a dance called an Ardeleana, a title indicating ‘Transylvanian’ in Romanian, and both it and the following tune are provided with accompaniments that allude to piping techniques without attempting to imitate them directly.
The ‘Bear Dance’ that ensues was recorded from the Gypsy violinist Pătru Drăguș in Maramarós County in 1914. Originally a rather quick dance, Bartók reduces the metronome marking by a third to create a more lumbering tempo indicative, presumably, of the movements of a bear. In the finale a further pair of fiddle tunes appears, transcribed from Ion Popovic and an unnamed Gypsy musician. The two tunes are performed sequentially (each played several times) and a brief coda coalesces them as the work comes to its joyous conclusion.
Bartók began work on the Three Rondos on Slovak folk tunes in 1916, but didn’t complete them until 1927. When the First World War broke out he was in despair, fearing he might never be able to go on his field trips again, but once it became clear in November 1914 that he would not be conscripted for military service, on health grounds, he began to plan future forays. Bartók collected all but one of the melodies used in the set of three rondos in the Slovak region of northern Hungary, in what was then known as Zólyom County, between July 1915 and April 1916, having previously found the penultimate (sixth) tune in the neighbouring Hont County in January 1914.
The settings are unashamedly populist in approach, eschewing many of the complexities of Bartók’s mature style. In the first, which has an ABACA rondo structure, the sections are connected by a tonal scheme which places the B theme in E major, a major third above the C major tonic, and the brief first reprise of the A section in A flat major, a major third below it. The initial material of the very lively second rondo (an ABACABA structure) is not directly based on folk tunes, these being retained for the B and C sections which are in D major and the Lydian mode on F respectively. Instead, a dissonant idea with accented offbeats provides the skeleton of the piece. For the third rondo, Bartók creates a tonal scheme in which the opening part moves from a version of the folk melody on the tonic F Lydian mode, through a version on C and thence to G, prefaced and separated by a pounding idea low in the piano. After a more reflective central episode based on a song which relates how a peasant girl discovers from the Hussars that her lover has been killed, the final section of the Rondo reverses the tonal direction of the first part, with versions of the tune on G and then C, before the return to the tonic F.
The virtuoso Études, Op 18, composed in 1918, present Bartók’s most radical experiments hitherto with chromaticism, dissonance and metrical complexity, and are his only extended concert studies for piano in the tradition of Chopin, Liszt and Busoni. In the first, a very fast piece with a motoric riff-like figure based on chromatic groups of four notes, the technical focus is on finger extension and precarious leaps. An episode towards the middle of the study involves the interaction of dissonant chords, and the left hand subsequently takes up a heavily accented chordal figure. The closing gesture of the study is a chord which bitonally superimposes G major in the left hand and F sharp major in the right hand.
The influence of Debussy can perhaps be heard in the impressionistic second study with its waves of broken chords that gradually extend against a sustained melody in the left hand. Prefiguring the composer’s night-music style, at times it almost appears to presage the language of Olivier Messiaen.
The capricious final study is a metric tour de force, switching time signature almost every bar in the first part and occasionally utilising 11/16 and 15/16. When the metre regularizes, in the central part of the study, the melody is split between the hands and played by the thumbs. Towards the end of the final section, Bartók overlays the regular semiquavers in the left hand with syncopated chords in the right that lie on the second, sixth and tenth semiquavers, though after all the furore the study finishes with an expressive gesture with sustained octaves leading to the tonic A quietly played deep in the bass of the piano.
1926 has reasonably been regarded as Bartók’s ‘year of the piano’, seeing the composition of three major works for the instrument: the first piano concerto (at long last providing him with a replacement for the Rhapsody of 1904 for concert performance with orchestra), Out of doors and the Piano Sonata. Bartók undoubtedly came under the sway of Igor Stravinsky at this time, and indeed on 15 March 1926 he had attended a concert in Budapest at which Stravinsky had performed his concerto for piano and wind instruments. However, Bartók’s sonata (which is in the overall tonality of E) can be seen to follow on logically from the technical and aesthetic advances of his earlier piano music, and in particular the Allegro barbaro and the Suite, Op 14.
The restless and relentless opening movement is composed in an unusual sonata form, the exposition of which takes up half of its duration and involves five distinct themes, each demonstrating in one way or other the impact, whether melodic, rhythmic, tonal or timbral, of traditional music. In the subsequent development section the first and second themes receive the most detailed consideration, and in the recapitulation only the first, fourth and fifth themes are reprised.
A funereal tone pervades the second movement, the longest of the three and the expressive heart of the sonata. It is composed in a ternary form in which the three sections employ the same fundamental material, the opening gesture of which involves a bell-like tolling using the pitches A flat–E flat–F in the left hand and an implacably repeated E in the right. Perhaps a distant echo of Ravel’s ‘Le gibet’ from Gaspard de la nuit can be discerned, though the mood is even more bleak and austere.
For the brilliant and bravura monothematic finale the tone changes completely. Bartók coalesces an ABACABA rondo with variation form and the music insinuates traditional performance practices without directly quoting folk tunes. Thus, for instance, the third episode is redolent of the approach of a peasant flautist such as those Székely musicians he recorded at Csík. While the sonata ends unambiguously in the tonic E, this tonality is not expressed by either major or minor chords, but by a combination of the pitches E, F, B and D that appears assertive, indeed triumphant in tone.
When the young Swiss conductor Paul Sacher approached him for a new chamber work, Bartók offered several options including a quartet for pianos and percussion, a piano trio, and a piece for voice and piano. By 30 June 1937 he had decided that it should be the former of these, though it was not until the end of August (after two months’ work on its composition) that he was able to confirm the title by which it is now known, the Sonata for two pianos and percussion. He decided to call it ‘Sonata’ rather than ‘Quartet’, because he felt there might be performances where more than two percussionists were required.
The ten years that had intervened between the composition of the piano sonata and this work had seen Bartók’s language become increasingly accessible after the experimentation of the previous decade, demonstrated most notably in his Cantata profana (1930), the fifth string quartet (1934), and the Music for strings, percussion and celesta (1936) a work that was also commissioned by Sacher. The new sonata was composed with the composer and his piano-duo partner—his wife, Ditta—in mind, and the pair performed it on a number of occasions, including in an arrangement he made of it as concerto for two pianos and orchestra which they played in his final public appearance on 22 and 23 April 1943 in Carnegie Hall.
The combination of two pianos and percussion was an innovation for the time. Bartók had previously used percussion in a colouristic rather than simply articulatory role in the middle movement of his first piano concerto, and the third movement of the Music for strings, percussion and celesta employed glissandi on the pedal timpani as a novel sonic effect. It is conceivable that jazz exerted some influence, though the percussion used goes well beyond the conventional jazz drummer’s ‘traps’ of the time.
Like the solo piano sonata, the sonata for two pianos and percussion is in three movements though in this case the proportions are quite different, the first movement lasting as long as the second and third combined. The tonality is C and while the final chord of the first movement involves just the tonic and dominant, avoiding the major or minor third, the closing sonority of the piece as a whole is an unalloyed C major chord.
In Bartók’s own analysis, the exposition of the first movement, after the chromatically meandering and eerie introduction beginning on F sharp, has two main themes which, like in Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, Op 53, are in C and E respectively. A rather jazzy idea follows, played against rolled glissandi between F sharp and A in the timpani; this is described as a ‘codetta’, though it might be considered as a third discrete theme which is developed and returns at the end of the recapitulation as a fughetta.
The slow movement is an exquisite night-music piece in three sections that has a similar feel and mood to the third movement of Music for strings, percussion and celesta. The measured opening theme is sombre, and in the second theme nervous quintuplets gradually build up to a major climax and decline. Bartók subsequently creates a remarkable mist of sound from rapid overlapping chromatic passages in the pianos and the reprise of the first theme emerges from this in the second piano.
In contrast, the third movement—another sonata structure, with three themes—is joyous and full of high spirits. Its main theme, while having a little in common with the melody of the first of Beethoven’s Contredanses, WoO14, employs a mode that Bartók found in Romanian folk music—like the major scale but with a sharpened fourth note and flattened seventh. At the end of the movement, rather than some grand apotheosis, the final sounds heard under the sustained piano chords and suspended cymbal are those of a snareless side drum gradually winding down and disappearing.
David Cooper © 2017

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