Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 04/27/2011, uploaded on 11/04/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

The Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs for piano marked a significant moment in Bela Bartók's output, the point at which he began to treat folk tunes as flexible musical material. Instead of taking a simple folk tune and harmonizing it, Bartók was now manipulating the folk tunes, transforming and shaping them to fit his compositional needs while still retaining their original spirit. He spent several years collecting folk tunes from all over Eastern Europe, especially his native Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. The eight Improvisations offer a variety of compositional techniques, from simple settings of the original melody with variations in the first piece – to polytonality, canonic imitation, bitonality, syncopated rhythms, and sudden tempo changes in the later pieces. The seventh Improvisation was dedicated to the memory of Claude Debussy whose music had a powerful effect on the younger Bartók early in the century. It is curious to note that, despite its dedicatee, there are virtually no stylistic elements of Debussy's music found in Bartók's piece.     Inesa Sinkevych