Bartok String Quartets 1949 Juilliard Recording

The Juilliard 1963 recording of the Bartok quartets has always been the gold standard of these works for me, and still is.  I'm afraid my response to the earlier recorded performances was rather, "very nice, but can we get to the '63 set now".  It was an injustice to these very fine performances.  If the technical command of these works had been perfected in the intervening years, and if, indeed, "THE" Juilliard for me are the various formations with Robert Mann and Claus Adam, the earlier group, with founding members of the Juillard Arthur Winograd on cello and Robert Koff as 2nd violin,  inscribed a committed and passionate performance of the six quartets to records.  The  fourth quartet has never been so accessible to me. 

The sound is not bad, although my records are original early 1950's pressings and they were well used before I got them.  The very outermost grooves of the first and second quartet were challenging to deal with. I think the distortion from groove damage has been minimized to acceptable levels in the renovation.  The best sounding of the set are 3-6, though I think 1-3 are perfectly acceptable given that they were taken from well used 70 year old records.  I haven't listened to the Pristine Classical renovation of these recordings, though they usually do a good job, even if sometimes things can sound a bit souped up. If you're interested in the recordings, why not give these renovations a listen. If you like the performances but not the sound, Pristine Classical will be available. I'm guessing they had cleaner sources than I, but as always any comments on the sound would help to improve my practices.

The tracks have been numbered for 3 CD's as indicated on the notes provided with the linked material.

The folder with all files for the six quartets is here: 

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/r2sx09lfuwh88/

Szigeti: 20th Century Masterpieces

Szigeti and his teacher, Hubay

These performances by Joseph Szigeti, made in 1952 and 1959, were drawn from 3 different LPs. I owe the Bartok and Ives Sonatas to a Japanese pressing of a Philips disc - 13PC-95. The Cowell Sonata came from a Columbia Special Products LP in the Modern American Music Series. The work was dedicated to Szigeti, who worked closely with the composer during its composition, and who made this, its first recording, in 1952. The Webern 4 Pieces come from a Mercury LP MG50442.

Included are:
Henry Cowell 1st Sonata for Violin and Piano with Carlo Bussotti, piano
Bela Bartok 2nd Sonata for Violin and Piano with Roy Bogas, piano
Charles Ives 4th Sonata for Violin and Piano with Roy Bogas
Anton Webern Four Pieces Op. 7 with Roy Bogas

By 1959 Szigeti was showing serious signs of technical decline owing to the progression of debilitating bone disease and arthritis. Nonetheless, there is a musical personality of strong convictions and a spirit of dedication to the works at hand that shines through these performances, making them indispensable to the Szigeti aficionado and a decided benefit to anyone with ears to hear music making that goes beyond ailing arms and fingers. The Bartok and Ives are works Szigeti recorded in his prime, being the first to record the Ives, and I highly recommend those performances; but these late efforts are justified by the musical intelligence of Szigeti's restless imagination, while the short Webern pieces, of unparallelled abstract beauty, are played with an intellectual and emotional commitment that belies the notion that the school of musical thought from which they arose is deservedly dead. In Szigeti's capable, though by now arthritic hands, this music gains the living breath it deserves.

The recording information is contained in a separate text file, available with the other linked content.

Link to all files

Reginald Kell plays Bartok Contrasts and Milhaud Suite

This is one gorgeous, glorious performance of Bartok's Contrasts. Like so much of his music, this piece works quite as well performed in a hard edged, no nonsense modernist manner or, like here, with the deep lyricism inherent in the tunes underscored and built upon. My favorite recording of the quartets, the 2nd Juilliard from, I believe 1963, emphasizes the intellectual, modernist Bartok, but I would not for the world be without the Vegh Quartet recordings, which are decidedly more lyrical. However he is performed, Bartoks music has always seemed to me to be filled with incredible melodic invention, the dissonance, even in the very concentrated 3rd and 4th quartets, being the consequence of boundless polyphonic ingenuity. Anyway, that's how I hear Bartok. The Milhaud is a divertimento of sorts, and a thoroughly delightful one. He is a composer much more closely identified with compositions for wind instruments than Bartok, who wrote only this one work for a solo wind instrument. The "night music" movement in his 1st Piano Concerto, though, has some very fine and beautiful writing for winds. I like Reginald Kell a lot. His tone is incredibly beautiful -- silk and satin -- his phrasing is impeccable, and he possesses a musical suavity that is never ostentatious but always in the service of the music. If you hadn't guessed, I adore this musician. He is joined on this recording by excellent partners Melvin Ritter, violin and Joel Rosen, piano, less famous but nonetheless estimable musicians who play admirably here. This recording is available as part of a boxed CD set of Kells' American Decca recordings. Link to all files

Tibor Serly conducts Bartok Divertimento

Bartok Records recordings of Bartok's music were often made by musicians with some personal association with the composer. Their importance to performance history is inestimable. If by now some of them seem far from conclusive readings, they are normally reasonably well recorded, well pressed for their time, and well, if not always definitively performed. This is a very nice recording led by Tibor Serly, who has the distinction of having been chosen to complete the orchestration of the last measures of Bartok's 3rd Piano Concerto and to decipher the cryptic shorthand in which the composer left his viola concerto, commissioned by William Primrose, to produce a performing edition. A composer of some talent himself, Serly fills the record with his own affecting arrangement for strings of Gesualdo's madrigal Dulcissima Mia Vita, and a string arrangement of Domenico Scarlatti's Cat's Fugue by A.W. Kramer. Baroque purists will have fits, but the Gesualdo, in particular, is delicious. I had uploaded the renovated files, but Buster at Big 10-Inch Record brought my attention to the fact that this LP is still available from Bartok Records, linked below. Link to buy LP from Bartok Records

I do not believe these are readily available anymore, so I am restoring my links to the renovated files I originally posted:  

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/ii2hsp4ow1phi/Bartok_Divertimento._Tibor_Serly

First Recording: Bartok 3rd Piano Concerto / Ormandy, Sandor

The above picture of the 78 set notwithstanding, the present offering comes from an LP I have of the recording (ML 4239), where it is coupled with the Miakowsky 21st symphony, which I have chosen not to post. I did own the 78 set at one point, and still have a tape from it, but the discs were in very bad shape. The pristine later LP transfer that I own is "electronically re-recorded to simulate stereo", and while not bad for that sort of thing, I preferred to use the earlier monaural record which simply sounded -- well -- less fake. Sandor was a lifetime champion of Bartok's music, as was Ormandy, who recorded convincing performances of the Miraculous Mandarin, Dance Suite, and other works. This is the first recording of the 3rd Piano Concerto, and while it has a sense of being "read" rather than interpreted, that may well be a good thing: There is much to recommend it. If the slow movement lacks some of the shimmering mysticism of many subsequent performances, it seems to me earthier, closer to the insect calls and other night sounds that inspired this classic Bartokian nocturne. Sandor, who studied with Bartok and was his friend, knows this music in his bones, and Ormandy (also Hungarian, we must remember) is, as always, superb in concerto work (and not just). The Philadelphia orchestra plays no less magically than it usually does, not just the always praised strings, but the winds too; there is not a section in the ensemble that is not superb. And the performance can be strongly recommended for much more than its historical significance as the first recording of the work. Like some other things posted here this record has not been entirely forgotten, and is available on CD from Pearl. I have not sought the cd it out or heard it, but the label usually does an acceptable job with little or no sonic manipulation. The files linked to below have been lightly restored, not to change the basic sound but to rid them of obvious LP noise. Link to folder with all files

Dorati Conducts Bartok Divertimento and Mozart Symphony 31

This is apparently a relatively rare LP, a fact I discovered only when I searched online to gather information on it for this post. Having bought it in a Boston thrift store eons ago and then learned the Bartok piece from it, I have always had a great fondness for it. I developed quite early a deep and enduring love for Bartok and with that I discovered the special properties Dorati brought to the performance of his music. If there are later recordings by the same maestro with more polished orchestras and better recorded sound, nonetheless, this performance retains a visceral excitement that warrants its being better known. And the Minneapolis Symphony, graced by a series of brilliant conductors -- Ormandy, Mitropoulos, Dorati -- was an accomplished ensemble that communicated a sense of the committment of those masters to the many modern works it recorded under them. The Mozart is stylish and beautifully performed, albeit with less than ideal recorded sound. It is apparently a performance much sought after, though. The Bartok was apparently recorded in 1950 and was an original LP release (RCA LM 1750), coupled with Kodaly's Háry János Suite. This later release, LM 1185, sees it coupled with the Mozart, a recording about which I still have almost no information. Link to folder with all FLAC and MP3 files

Erno Balogh Plays Liszt

This performance of the Italy portion of the Années de Pélerinage of Liszt is by Erno Balogh, a student of Bartok and Kodaly who preceded the former to the U.S. and helped arrange his first visit here in 1927. All that is available on CD, as far as I can tell, are his performances as an accompanist -- for Lotte Lehman, Fritz Kreisler, and, perhaps, Grace Moore.

He made a number of records for Lyrichord, but a search of their present catalog turns up nothing. I felt strongly that the recording was worth renovating from a challengingly used and abused thrift store bargain bin LP, both for Balogh’s link to Bartok and for the performance itself, which is beautifully articulated.

There was apparently some difficulty with some of these files on MediaFire, so I have reposted them in zipped folders labeled "REDO". The original folder are also there temporarily, as they seemed to work for some.

Link

Gertler and Farnadi Play Bartok Sonatas 1 and 2

These recordings of the Bartok sonatas by André Gertler and Edith Farnadi have long been among my favorites. Both musicians had full European careers and tended to be under-rated here in the States. Gertler, however, was one of the finest fiddlers of his generation, graced with an intensely focused intonation and indulging few histrionics, and Farnadi is a pianist to contend with. If, at the end of the day, Szigeti’s idiosyncratic fingering and bow technique are often more convincing to me, I am not immune to the charms of Gertler’s more straight-forward artistry. And in soft, quiet passages with significant bow movement, where Szigeti could sound scratchy as early as the nineteen forties, Gertler maintains a steady bow and an impressive clarity of tone as evidenced in the recordings presented here. I cannot recommend too highly this long unavailable recording of these two incredibly beautiful sonatas of Bartok.

Link

Tibor Kozma plays Bartok

This is a lovely record from Bartok Records, their #918, though I don't believe it is any longer available on their site. Recorded in very natural sounding monaural, this very well used record really came to life after running a decrackle filter. I did a further dehiss, and a high pass with a cutoff of 80hz to get rid of some rumble without compromising the fullness of the bass. To my ears it sounds pretty good.

Tibor Kozma was a beloved conducting instructor at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=3900#kozma , for many years after conducting and coaching at the Metropolitan Opera, where he made a number of recordings. He did at least one other project for Bartok Records, as pianist on a record of folk songs arrranged by Bartok and Kodaly -- Bartok Records #904. Wikipedia has an informative, basic article on him. He does a quite creditable job here, even if he does lose himself briefly in the final measures of the Folk Dances. Those are ubiquitously available, though, (by Foldes, Schiff, and Sandor, to name only three in my personal collection) while recordings of the Bagatelles and Christmas Carols, where he acquits himself nicely, are harder to come by.

The Bagatelles are a revelation, presenting Bartok's early harmonic thinking in charming, short piano pieces that serve as a primer to elements that will remain in the master's musical vocabulary throughout some of his greatest masterpieces. To hear them presented here with such disarming simplicity is to remember once again the deep roots in Balkan folk music of Bartokian modernism.

Link to all files