The Bartók Album

text

The divisions between folk- and classical-art have always been spurious - and generally Western, at that. Folk music has, of course, been a source of plunder for "high" composers since the very notion of written musical composition first emerged in the late middle ages. But the first few years of our own century saw many composers begin to acknowledge this for the first time; witness Vaughn Williams cataloguing English folksong and Charles Ives (in an albeit less conspicuously academic fashion) drawing on the music of small town Americana. For some reason, though, it was Hungary which saw perhaps the most highly regarded adoption of a nation's folk music by its best-known 20th century composer: Bela Bartók. Bartók openly collected folk song and then drew on its inspiration in his own writing; the resulting rhythmic and melodic fire in his music is hugely apparent. Anyhow, almost a century later, the tables are turned. Muzsikás are Hungary's best known folk export who have delighted audiences the world over with their exuberant interpretations of their country's folk music. The reasons are not difficult to see; the same rhythmic complexity and emotional intensity (somehow akin to klezmer's paradoxically exuberant melancholy) which infused Bartòk's work shines out of theirs. Their fame has not been unaided by the presence in their ranks of singer Márta Sebestyén, whose overwhelmingly moving voice was heard throughout the soundtrack to The English Patient. For this album, the group is joined by British violinist and contemporary music champion Alexander Balanescu in a set of re-interpretations of Bartók's own take on folk. This two- (or is it three- ?) way process has worked brilliantly. The group respond to the challenge of marrying compositional complexity with emotional depth as successfully as Bartók himself, as they veer from rampaging, breakneck odd-metre dances to ballads shot through with an unmistakable feeling of loss. A brave experiment then, but one which truly works.