Dance Suite

Molto tranquillo - Ritornell -

Comodo -

Finale: allegro

…The folk music influences which transformed Bartók's style were not exclusively Hungarian. His researches started in Hungary in 1906, but three years later he was just as involved in Romanian folk song, and in 1913 he was in North Africa collecting examples from the nomadic Arab tribes of Biskra. In the service of his ideal he did not, as he said, "reject and influence, be it Solavkian, Romanian, Arabic, or from any other source. The source must only be clean, fresch, and halthy!" Even in a work like the Dance Suite for orchestra, written in 1923 to celebrate a Hungarian national occasion - the fiftieth anniversary of the merging of Buda, Pest and Obuda - there was no discrimination on national grounds where his sources were concerned. Nor, in fact, did the alien influences make the work any less popular with the Hungarian audience, which is why (in 1925) Bartók was persuaded by his publisher to arrange the orchestral score for piano. As it turned out, the new version did not achieve the commercial success they had hoped for, presumably because it is so difficult to play. But now at last it is winning recognition as a masterpiece of piano transcription, equalling any twentieth-century work in that abused category.

The first movement, which achieves its brilliant intensity from dark and rumbling beginnings quite as impressively as in the orchestral version, is Arabian in character. At least, it is until the beautiful and definitely Hungarian Ritornello which acts as a link between the movements. The Allegro molto is Hungarian too, though it has enough in common with the first movement, metrically and melodically, to be regarded as a more lively variant of it. Though the enormous trombone and string glissandos in the orchestral version cannot be reproduced here, the pentatonic music of the next movement (of mixed Hungarian, Romanian and Arabian parentage) sounds just as effective on the piano as in the original version, which has to call on keyboard help in the middle section anyway.

There is a pause but no Ritornello before the fourth movement, which is an interersting development of the Sostenuto in the Suite, Op.14. Bars of quiet chord clusters alternate with snatches of Arabian monody. The Ritornello leads this time into a dance described by Bartók as "so primitive that one can only speak of a primitive peasant character here, and any classification according to nationality must be abandoned." It runs straight into the Finale, which intensifies its primitive qualities into something approaching savagery before going on to review most of the earlier dances and engaging them and the Ritornello in a brilliant and civilised unity.

Molto tranquillo - Ritornell -

Comodo -

Finale: allegro

Bartók was disappointed by the lukewarm reception accorded to his Dance Suite on its first performance in Budapest in 1923. Having made it accessible, or so he thought, he was inclined to blame the orchestra: “In spite of its simplicity,” he reported to his publisher, “there are a few difficult places and our Philharmonic people were not adult enough for them.” While that was no doubt true, there could have been another problem. The Dance Suite had been commissioned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the union of Buda and Pest, which was a specifically Hungarian natonal occasion. Kodály, whose Psalmus Hungaricus was first performed with tremendous success in the same Budapest Philharmonic concert, made no mistake about that. Bartók, on the other hand, was not interested in national exclusivity. “My own idea,” he explained later, “is the brotherhood of peoples…I try to serve this idea in my music; therefore I don’t reject any influence, be it Slovakian, Romanian, Arabic or from any other source. The source must only be clean, fresh and healthy!”

In fact, while there is little trace of a Slovakian influence in the Dance Suite - even though most of it was written at Radvány in southern Slovakia in the summer of 1923 - there is a significant Romanian element in it and possibly even more material derived from Arabic than from Hungarian sources. The heavy-footed dance tune heard on bassoon in the opening bars is clearly, with its distinctive chromatic intervals, of Arab origin. Awarded usually but not exclusively to lower woodwind or brass, it dominates the whole of the sinister Moderato first movement, which has little room for anything else. The Hungarian consolation is the lovely, nostalgic melody of the Ritornell which is introduced on a flourish from the harp by four muted violins and which is to make several refreshing and structurally formative reappearances during the course of the work.

The theme of the Allegro molto second movement, which follows the Ritornell with scarcely a break, is a contrastingly vigorous example of Hungarian dance luridly coloured by aggressive trombone glissandi (in a manner not unlike that of the Miraculous Mandarin ballet that Bartók was working on at much the same time). The first recall of the Ritornell, with the melody now on clarinet, precedes the central Allegro vivace, which is a comparatively cheerful scherzo based on two recurring themes - a pentatonic Hungarian bagpipe tune introduced by bassoon and a Romanian fiddle dance energetically scraped by first violins over a rowdy accompaniment in the rest of the orchestra.

The scherzo is followed directly, without a recall of the Ritornell, by a Molto tranquillo slow movement of Arab inspiration, eerily scored clusters of fourths on strings and piano alternating with sinuous lines of chromatic melody on unison woodwind. Although the Ritornell is only briefly recalled before the short and primitive Comodo fifth movement, it does make a timely final appearance in the middle of an otherwise frantic Finale, which jostles several earlier dance tunes against its own peremptory material.

It is significant that the Dance Suite achieved its first great success when it was performed before an international audience by Václav Talich and the Czech Philharmonic at the ISCM Festival in Prague in 1925.