Bartok: The Miraculous Mandarin / Dance Suite / Contrasts
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BELA BARTOK
Bartok: The Miraculous Mandarin / Dance Suite / Contrasts
Philharmonia Orchestra, Philharmonia Voices, Esa-Pekka Salonen, with Yefim Bronfman (piano)
[ Signum / CD ]
Release Date: Friday 23 September 2016
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Recorded as part of their critically praised 'Infernal Dance' season, the Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen explores three contrasting works by Béla Bartók-Dance Suite, The Miraculous Mandarin, and the chamber piece Contrasts.
Contrasts is one of Bela Bartok's most imaginative forays into the world of chamber music. His only chamber work involved a woodwind instrument (for Piano, Clarinet and Violin), Contrasts originated in a commission from the American King of Swing, Benny Goodman.
Composed to mark the 50th anniversary of Budapest in 1923, Bartok's Dance Suite is a rhapsodic collection of folk inspired tunes that marked a sonorous change in direction from the composer's more dissonant works up to that point.
The ballet-pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin is raw, dangerous, exotic and elemental: using the rarely performed full ballet score it is frenzied music, percusive, sensuous and violent, telling a shocking story of desire and death.
"the now-or-never concert adrenaline is palpable. There's unflinching attack in the savage pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin, deadpan wit in the gentler Dance Suite, and it's all delivered with that unnervingly meticulous, steely focus that conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen gets from the Philharmonia." Guardian
"Salonen and the Philharmonia relish the rhythmic barbarity, which rivals that of The Rite of Spring - the strings digging deep in the furious allegro. Salonen is in his element in Bartok's hardcore modernism, but the more accessible Dance Suite is superbly played, too." Sunday Times
"Superb clarinet playing from the Philharmonia soloists, as in the two subsequent games, where the tension mounts (screaming woodwinds really tell) and Salonen marks the mandarin's arrival with gutsy accents and powerful brass…[he] keeps this highly graphic and emotionally potent music on the move…this performance is more compelling than most. It generates a genuine sense of theatre" Gramophone
