Bartók: 44 Duos and Original Field Recordings. Alexandra Preucil, violin; Antoine Tamestit, viola. Harmonia Mundi (HMM902773). Total time: 57:24
DIGITAL REVIEW — “Practice your exercises every day!” Few exhortations strike such dread into the hearts of music students.
Yet an extraordinary teacher occasionally attempts to make the genre of instrumental exercise into something less enervating and more musical. Béla Bartók was one such educator, and the new recording of his duets for two violins by Alexandra Preucil and Antoine Tamestit — playing violin and viola, respectively — demonstrates his imaginative approach to pedagogy.
In the same vein as Bartók’s better-known Mikrokosmos volumes for the student pianist, these 44 Duos were created to help young players open their ears beyond major and minor keys and 4/4 time. The miniatures were created for German violin teachers Erich Doflein and his wife, Elma Axenfeld, who commissioned several composers (including Carl Orff and Paul Hindemith) to make interesting and pleasurable études for a violin method book. Although Doflein and Axenfeld only asked for 32 pieces, Bartók wrote 12 more. Then again, he had a secondary motive that provided great inspiration.
Although Bartók is best known today as a composer, he is arguably just as important for his groundbreaking work as an ethnomusicologist (before that term existed), studying the traditional music of his native Hungary was well as that of Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, and Algeria. Besides traveling to remote villages to notate what he heard played and sung, as was the standard method of collection up to that time, Bartók took advantage of new technology. From 1907-1916, he captured the precious melodies on wax cylinders, hauling hand-cranked, non-electronic phonographic equipment all over the region. It must have been an incredible tactical feat.
What he did with those recordings and notations is just as significant: Rather than thinking of the music as a museum exhibit to be frozen and preserved, he viewed it as a living organism to be allowed to grow and evolve in a changing environment. His Romanian Folk Dances are the most famous example of how he used this source material to create new music. The violin duos are another, and Preucil and Tamestit made the decision to present the student exercises next to the field recordings that informed them. The result is a rare and fascinating look into Bartók as both composer and scholar of native musics.
As one would expect of Bartók, his interpretations draw from a bottomless well of creativity. The lucky student is expected to master intricate pizzicatos, long sustained lines, time signatures outside the western European norm (7/8, for example), meters that change mid-piece, and tricky rhythmic constructs. It also helps a young player overcome the common fear of dissonance and polytonality, teaching that the non-triadic can be beautiful and purposeful and not feel like a “wrong note.”
Not every Bartók miniature is preceded by the field recording that provided its basic material, but those that are sound the more vibrant for it. To know that a scratchy, tinny recording of an old woman singing — one pictures her on a hand-crafted chair, her feet tapping on the packed-dirt floor of her kitchen — became the gentle-lined “Midsummer Night Song” (No. 4) feels like taking a peek into Bartók’s mind.
Hearing all 44 miniatures is akin to international travel for the ear. Some stops on the itinerary: a haunting “Ruthenian Song” (No. 10), “Ruthenian” referring to the East Slavik language used from the 14th through 18th centuries; an “Arab Song” (No. 42) with strident eighth notes in the violin serving as framework for a chromatically swirling viola line (its source recording, from Maghreb in North Africa, is a tune played on a reed instrument and drum); a sprightly “Serbian Dance” (No. 39) that, while not quite imitative, gives the sense that the instruments are chasing each other; and the “Gay Song” (No. 24) with a Ukrainian source, its meter and tempo as slippery as fish in the Dnieper River. The presence of the field recordings only enhances this musical journey.
Preucil and Tamestit made the interesting choice not to present the Duos in their numbered order, which Bartók himself explained was only meant to organize them by the logic of a pupil’s development. Instead, the album tracks are ordered to maximize musical flow and contrast. Thus the languid “Romanian Song” (No. 7), with its sighing responses, is followed by the brighter “Hungarian Song” (No. 25).
The two players (they sometimes style themselves the Starker Duo in honor of Preucil’s grandfather, Hungarian cellist János Starker) would have made an important contribution with this release merely for the way it’s constructed. But, as it happens, the études are also finely played, with thoughtful phrasing, conversational interaction, and gorgeous tone from both instruments.
For those intrigued by Bartók’s field recordings, there’s another project worth listening to that uses them in a very different way. In 2020, the trio of pianist Lucian Ban, bass clarinet/soprano saxophonist John Surman, and violist Mat Maneri released Transylvanian Folk Songs: The Béla Bartók Field Recordings. They have created what might be called free-jazz interpretations of Bartók’s source material, working from both his collected sound files and his own transcriptions of them.
Bartók, believing as he did that tradition is a living thing, would likely approve.
