Re: Ives Concord + Bartok

[John Hill <jphill@home.com>]

Bradley P Lehman wrote:
>  
> 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.

A good deal of Bartok's writing for the piano is percussive in nature.  He
generally treated the instrument as a percussion instrument first and I've
always had the feeling that GG didn't like that.  Plus, many of the textures
(percussive clusters, etc.) in Bartok's writing are homophonic and have
no real contrapuntal intent.  Whenever faced with homophonic textures
GG always seemed to want to bring inner voice aspects out (kind of like
he was programmed at an early age to approach all music polyphonically).
Let's face it, when you do that to a group of percussive clusters, you don't
get much back!

> 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?

Hard to say.  Webern and Schoenberg were pretty progressive, even for
his teachers at the Royal Conservatory.  I would argue that Bartok is more
approachable for the average listener.  Don't know about the non-Germanic
part.  He seems to have had nice things to say about other composers who
were not Germanic (Gibbons, Byrd, Sibelius, Scriabin, et. al.) whose works
he recorded.  I think it had to do more with the music.
  
> 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....

Well, that would have meant reversing himself on his position vis a vis
competition and it's role in music.  Again, what GG *said* was often
at odds with his actual feelings or practice.  But he did manage to remain
*philosphically* consistent in his outlook.

jh