- The Brilliant Clarinet Ensemble 10 · 2009
- Bartók At the Piano 1 · 1991
- Bartók At the Piano 1 · 1991
- Bartók At the Piano 1 · 1991
- Bartók At the Piano 1 · 1991
- Bartok: Violin Concertos Nos. 1 And 2 · 1999
- Joseph Szigeti Plays Bartók, Bloch, Milhaud, de Falla & Mozart (Remastered) · 2021
- Bartók: Mikrokosmos, Sz 107 · 2006
- Benny Goodman - Collector's Edition · 1986
- Bartók: Mikrokosmos, Sz 107 · 2006
- Bartók: Mikrokosmos, Sz 107 · 2006
- Bartok: Contrasts - Mikrokosmos, Vols. 4-6 · 2006
- Bartok: Contrasts - Mikrokosmos, Vols. 4-6 · 2006
Essential Albums
- Recorded towards the end of his 25-year reign at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Salonen here demonstrates what a superb orchestra he’d trained. Playing is crisp, rhythmically precise, but also alive to the amazing range of colors these three works demand. Mussorgsky’s ghoulish nocturnal fiesta takes on a menace in its original scoring; Bartók’s sleazy ballet oozes atmosphere; and Stravinsky’s shattering Rite has rarely been presented with such a feeling for its orchestral originality, thanks to the magnificent recording.
Artist Playlists
- One of the true game-changers of 20th-century music.
- 2024
Appears On
- Stundom, Emma Kragh-Elmøe & Jonas Frølund
About Béla Bartók
There was always a sense that Bartók was not quite of this world. At a time when most musical modernists were thoroughly urban in attitude, Bartók felt ill at ease in cities, looking instead to nature for inspiration. The sounds of night—birdcalls, insect noises—found echo in the magnificent concertos and string quartets that form the backbone of his output. He was a pioneering collector of folk music, and the colorful modes and complex rhythms he found in the music of the Balkans and his native Hungary stimulated many of his own stunning musical inventions, right through to his final, life-affirming work, the Concerto for Orchestra (1943). Born in what is now Romania in 1881, this intensely private man also looked deep into the darker regions of the human soul, forming what he found into such beautiful, finely structured, but also disturbing masterpieces as the opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) and the revolutionary Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936). Hungary’s capitulation to the Nazis in the Second World War horrified him and he fled, ending up in New York, where he died of leukemia in 1945, just as his music was beginning to enjoy belated popularity.
- HOMETOWN
- Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary
- BORN
- March 25, 1881
- GENRE
- Classical