Word: barts
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Robbins' longer work, Piano Pieces, was an immediate hit. In it he gives some deservedly obscure Tchaikovsky piano works the elegance of Chopin and catches the bursting talents of more young stars. The ballet's best pas de deux shows the fleet wit of Heather Watts and Bart Cook, who always seem to see the double side of life. The choreographer also notes the rippling serenity of Kyra Nichols, who sometimes seems unaware of the audience. Most of all, Robbins shows off Ib Andersen. Since he has four new roles, this might even be called an Ib Andersen...
...BartÓk's reputation, however, has grown steadily. The reason is not hard to find. Despite a sometimes highly dissonant and rhythmically spiky style, his music has a strong, direct appeal. As Musicologist Mosco Garner has observed: "Of the three musicians who dominated the musical scene during the first half of the 20th century-Stravinsky, Schoenberg and BartÓk-it is the Hungarian master who, despite his intellectual control, remained the nearest to the instinctual, the irrational in music, and thus to the Dionysian spirit...
...caricature by Aline Fruhauf shows BartÓk calmly playing the piano and producing a cacophony. The caption reads: "Bela BartÓk, the mild-mannered revolutionist." Shy and reserved, he knew that his compositions were difficult, and was not hopeful about their appeal. "He never expected the public to like them and play them," recalled Publisher Ralph Hawkes of Boosey & Hawkes. "Apathy and even aversion to his music was to be found everywhere." Dorati told TIME Correspondent Christopher Redman last week: "Even in Hungary, I was sometimes whistled off the podium...
What made BartÓk's music so unusual, so unsettling? Other composers-Stravinsky, Prokofiev -were rhythmically tricky; still others-Schoenberg, Webern-were even less conventionally melodic. With BartÓk the difference lay in his rejection of the German musical models that had long been dominant. Visiting the dying composer in New York one day, Dorati recalls finding him engrossed in a copy of Edward Grieg's Piano Concerto. Asked why he was studying such a romantic score, BartÓk said that Grieg was important because he had "cast off the German yoke...
...Instead, BartÓk looked to his own Eastern Europe for inspiration and found it in folk music. In 1905 he and fellow Composer Zoltán Kodály began their pioneering work in ethnomusicology, traveling the back roads of Hungary armed only with an Edison phonograph and insatiable curiosity. They discovered the authentic tunes of the Magyars, largely based on modal orpentatonic (five-note) scales and sung to jagged, irregular rhythms, rather than the gypsy melodies used by Liszt, Brahms and even BartÓk in such early works as the Op. 1 Rhapsody that had previously passed...