ESO to Perform Bartók's Folk-inspired Masterpiece

The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, born in 1881, is regarded as one of the founders of the field of ethnomusicology. Bartók met the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály when he was a student at the Royal Academy of Budapest. The two composers traveled the Hungarian countryside to collect folk melodies and ultimately preserved thousands of songs. They transcribed the folk melodies, analyzed them and incorporated elements of the melodies in their own music. Over his lifetime, Bartók collected and arranged folk music from Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria. He also recorded Arab music as a result of his trips to Algeria and Morocco.

Bartók’s Dance Suite was commissioned for the 50th anniversary of Hungary’s capital, Budapest. The event was celebrated by a concert in 1923 with new works by the three leading Hungarian composers of the period - Bartók, Kodály and Ernst von Dohnányi. Dohnányi conducted the Dance Suite’s first performance.

Instead of rearranging folk melodies for Dance Suite, Bartók created completely original melodies that imitated the folk music styles of a number of nationalities. For example, Bartók himself noted that Dance Suite’s first movement’s opening theme uses a melody imitating early Arab music along with the folk rhythms of Eastern Europe. The second movement is influenced by Hungarian folk music, the third is a blend of Hungarian, Romanian, and Arab inspired music, the fourth has an Arab character, the fifth is not associated with any particular nationality but still has a folk character. The finale movement returns to the thematic material of the earlier movements.

In this way, Bartók comingled the music of a variety of cultures in Dance Suite, often performed without breaks between movements. For an unusual performance illustrating the Hungarian folk music that inspired Bartok followed by the end of Bartok’s Dance Suite, watch this clip from the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. (The folk music, played by the Hungarian group Musikazs, is the first 3:20 of the clip; the finale of the Dance Suite is the remaining 4:40.)

Come hear for yourself in the ESO's second program of its 2013-2014 season on Sunday, March 16 at 2:30 pm at Pick-Staiger Hall, 50 Arts Circle Drive in Evanston. The concert also features Jean Sibelius’ rousing Second Symphony and Franz Liszt’s virtuosic Totentanz (Dance of Death) with the “young super-virtuoso” Russian pianist Gleb Ivanov.