Evening in Transylvania


This piece known as Evening in Transylvania and also Evening in the Village is from the composer’s piano collection Ten Easy Pieces. There are two original melodies one played slowly with rubato and the other played quickly and in strict time. Essentially whilst working in the folk music idiom Bartok remains loyal to the principle of contrast in music exploring two different ideas. Bartok is always very precise about the articulations that he requires in his music and players need to take notice of the dynamics which are notated in both clefs. The rhythmic purpose of his music is always very strong and whilst delivery of the melody needs to be quite fluid in the rubato section the music nevertheless needs to be delivered with a strong sense of pulse. From bar 42 the music texturally is notated and conceived in four parts. In the realisation the tempo is 76 quarter note (crotchet) beats in the lento rubato sections and 132 quarter note (crotchet beats) beats in the Vivo, non rubato sections. Some pedalling has been indicated in the score but the music editor suggests minimal use as modern instruments are tonally much stronger that those of the composers own time. Bartok considered the piano to be a percussion instrument and as a composer many of his folk music arrangements explore the modal element that is so characteristic of folk music and accompaniments make use of ostinatos. Much of his piano music was composed for teaching purposes and collections such as For Children and Mikrokosmos are well worth exploring. Bartok is one of the greatest 20th century composers and made a significant contribution to the repertoire. As a composer he worked on small canvasses as well as large ones and frequently ideas were transferred from the small to the large. This particular piece was transcribed by the composer into the first of his Hungarian Sketches for orchestra. He was Hungarian by birth and was important collector of folk music and one of the founders of the relatively new subject of ethnomusicology. He has something in common with Schubert in that both of them were very creative towards the end of their lives. Bartok left Europe in 1940 to settle in the U.S.A. but his health declined and he died from leukaemia in 1945 sadly before many of his concert hall works had become well known and recognised as great works.





Added:   2019-03-25 11:32:53   | Views  : 1715    | Downloads  : 0    

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