Selection from 44 Violin Duos

Unlike all the other composers represented in this programme, Bartók was not a string player. He did, however, have such an intimate knowledge of the violin that he wrote some of the greatest of all 20th-century music for the instrument – including, towards the end of his life, the masterly solo Sonata for Yehudi Menuhin. The 44 Violin Duos, a selection from which is to be performed in this occasion, was an educational project undertaken at the request of the German violin teacher Erich Dorflein in 1931. As in the very much more ambitious Mikrokosmos for piano, the pieces are presented in order of difficulty and are remarkable for their musical interest – contrapuntal, harmonic, rhythmic – even in some of the simple early numbers. Avoiding the use of harmonics, employing little pizzicato (the major exception being No.43, every note of which is plucked) and sparing in double-stops, the Duos are a resourcefully varied treatment of East-European and North African folk material, mostly songs but in two cases (Nos. 38 and 44) Romanian fiddle tunes.