Word: bartok
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...with Harvard's Luise Vosgerchian as soloist. Octandre, for seven winds and contrabass, seemed individual but not highly original, consisting of some explorations of the percussive possibilities of wind articulation, propulsive rhythms, and generally uninteresting timbres. The piece seems much less provocative than the contemporary experiments of Hindemith, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Cowell. The Movements, however, a strictly twelve-tone piece, is characterized by pellucid, crystalline registration, pointillistic rhythmical control, and Stravinsky's unique unsentimental lvricism. This work linked Threni and Agon (1956), a supreme masterpiece, to the later Sermon, Narrative and a Prayer and The Flood, Movements makes clear once...
...Yamash'ta and his fellow kitchen chefs, there is more creative music around for the forgotten men of the orchestra than ever before. Among composers of the past, Hector Berlioz was perhaps the first to pay much attention to the symphonic battery of drums. Later on, Stravinsky and Bartok proved that percussionists could do more interesting things than simply thump out a basic rhythm. Nowadays such avant-gardists as Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Luciano Berio and Karl-heinz Stockhausen treat the percussionist as a performer with rights (and responsibilities) equal to any other soloist...
Stravinsky himself, as well as the other non avant-garde master, Bela Bartok, was able to come to intellectual terms with the esthetic crisis of post-romantic music. Each one of Stravinsky's works, especially Le Sacre du Printemps, Les Noces, Symphony of Psalms, Agon, and the new Requiem Canticles, represents a new solution in considerably more traditional terms to the problems of contemporary musical speech. If the avant -garde chooses to ignore his principle, if it is possible to ignore it, then renewal will have become chaotic...
...part of Anglo-Saxon composers, their incessant celebration of the precious and popular, reaches an apotheosis of sorts when a British commentator asserts that Benjamen Britten's personality "does not show Stravinsky's uncomplicated sadomasochism, Schönberg's desexualization of music, or the naive barbarism of Bartok." There is really no answer to this kind of a chocolate-cream musicologist except to suggest that he write his glutinous panegyrics on the backs of sugar packets. CHRIS ROCHESTER
...MOST conservative piece of the evening was Leonard Lehrman's String Trio, written with frank lyricism, at times slightly oleoginous, culminating in a strong last page of almost botanical beauty. The work is not wholly successful as its ostinato Intermezzo is banal. The piece is redolent of the elegaic Bartok but would be properly described as derivative rather than eclectic...