Word: scherzo
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From the first tranquil notes of the oboes, on through all the simple, light-hearted melodies of the Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra, the music was ingratiating, undemanding-and, somehow, startling. The audience kept turning to its program notes for reassurance that this really was a composition by Bela Bartok...
Only now and then, as Pianist Louis Kentner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra performed the Scherzo's British premiere last week, could Bartok fans find hints of the more familiar dissonances and pounding rhythms of the composer's later career. This was vintage stuff, dating back to Bartok's early romantic period. And after a long orchestral introduction, Kentner opened a floodgate of lush, big-fisted chords...
...baroness is also a painter, and between 1955 and 1959 she donated eight of her own paintings to three schools, Arizona State College, Milwaukee-Downer College and Emma Willard School in Troy, N.Y. The market value claimed on her tax returns ranged from $1,000 for an abstraction called Scherzo to $30,000 each for the three parts of her triptych Con Moto, Andante and Allegro. Last month, Internal Revenue challenged the evaluations in the U.S. Tax Court in Manhattan...
...Bartok Suite Op. 14 also did not lack spirit and whimsy. When violence was in order, as in the 'Scherzo,' Hellman supplied it. In the concluding 'Sostenuto,' he gleefully intercalated a grotesque, ponderous obbligato, while reviving the lyricism which so finely sculptured the Sarabande in the Bach...
...vigor and accuracy of the concluding two movements of Schumann's Sonata No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 22, however, were the evening's technical highpoint. In the Scherzo (Molto presto marcato). Hellman maintained a push, a drive, which testified to real stamina. The final Rondo (Presto) alternated diving attacks with lyric interludes, and Hellman polished off the sonata with, as ever, controlled, smooth strength...