Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók forged a modernist language from peasant song, asymmetrical dance rhythms and pungent harmony. His string quartets, piano bagatelles and graded teaching pieces still sound raw, lucid and fiercely alive.
Folk melody is not decoration here: it is absorbed until it becomes a musical mother tongue. The six string quartets chart that path with unsparing clarity; the Sixth threads a Mesto refrain through every movement. Fourteen Bagatelles announce a new piano sound of clustered harmony and folk-inflected bite. Mikrokosmos and For Children give young players real music (peasant dances, jeering songs, Bulgarian rhythms) rather than watered-down exercises. Slow movements often open into night music: eerie dissonance behind lonely melody. Tonality is stretched, never abandoned, and the modernism still invites the ear in.
Compositions by Béla Bartók appear on
Flash: Marimba Miniatures
Flash is Claire Edwardes’s second Tall Poppies recording: a warm programme of marimba miniatures drawn from her pianist beginnings and life with two young daughters, pairing new Australian works with transcribed children’s piano gems on the five-octave marimba.
For Children
Geoffrey Tozer plays piano music by Bach, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Schubert, Prokofiev, Bartók and Schumann written especially for children.