Re: Ives Concord + Bartok

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, John Hill wrote:

> GG generally avoided music of a bombastic, showy nature and seems
> to have been drawn primary to contrapuntal works whose structures
> could be used as a jumping off point for individual interpretation.  He
> did *speak* of Ives from time to time, but seems not to have been very
> drawn to his music.  Same thing with Bartok, but perhaps for different
> reasons.

I too wonder why GG avoided Bartok, whose piano music is brilliantly
well-crafted.  It's contrapuntally sound, clever, and ingenious; rarely
bombastic or showy.  There are also theorists who have built analytical
careers on Bartok's use of form, proportion, phrase structure, and motivic
construction (anybody here go through a university music theory curriculum
*without* analyzing some Bartok?).  All this would seem to be right up
GG's alley.  Bartok was also a particularly refined pianist in
interpreting his own and others' works, as his recordings show.

Did GG perhaps ignore Bartok because BB tended to be a progressive
adventurer, while GG was generally more drawn to the musical conservatives
and reactionaries?  Or perhaps because Bartok was non-Germanic?

Speaking of non-Germanic composers who were into ethnomusicological
collection and arrangement, I wish GG had played more Grieg, too.  There
at least GG claimed some kinship.

How about GG tackling the Barber sonata with its fugal last movement?  
That too seems a natural GG piece that he didn't play.  If he wanted to
"out-Horowitz Horowitz," why didn't he take him on in this sonata instead
of the Prokofiev 7?  (In the Barber GG could have also directly challenged
his own contemporary, Van Cliburn, while he was at it.  VC and VH both did
marvelous recordings of this piece.)  

Or he could have gone after both VH and Richter by giving us a version of
the Mussorgsky Pix, in his own meta-Horowitzed transcription, throwing in
some overdubbing of contrapuntal parts derived from Ravel....

Bradley Lehman ~ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/ 
Dayton, VA, USA ~ 38.43N+78.98W