Composer Bart

As piquant and pungent as paprika is the music of Bela Bartok, Hungary's highest-browed composer. During the past fortnight, with the U. S. musical season well along in the salad course, many a concert program was well sprinkled with Bartok. Diffident, wispy, grey, Bela Bartok himself was visiting the U. S., for the second time in his 59 years, looking unlike the way his severe works sound.

In Washington, at a reverent chamber-music festival, Composer Bartok at the piano collaborated with an eminent friend and compatriot, Violinist Joseph Szigeti (pronounced zig-get'ty), in his First Rhapsody and Second Sonata. The same pair gave the Rhapsody a repeat performance in Manhattan. The Philadelphia Orchestra played two "Bartok Images, fairly easy on the ears. The League of Composers had scheduled an all-Bartok concert in Manhattan for this week, once again with "Bartok and Szigeti on the stage.

Bartok, a precise, percussive pianist, was to play pieces with titles like From the Diary of a Fly, Syncopation, From the Island of Bali, from his Mikrokosmos, which was published last week.*

Bartok Bela (as Hungarians call him) as a mouse-poor student roamed his native land, bending a sensitive ear to its folk songs. Among the peasants Bartok met, by purest chance, another composer with the same idea: Zoltan Kodaly. The two got together, noted down several thousand melodies. Kodaly drew lustier inspiration from the Hungarian soil than Bartok: his suite from the opera Hary Janos, depicting the exploits of a mythical Magyar hero, became a concert favorite. Bartok's mature music suggested his homeland only by a tricky complex of rhythms, dressed up in some of the sourest dissonances ever devised.

When Hungary went briefly Communist, in 1919, its dissonant Government put Bartok, Kodaly and its third well-known composer, academic Ernst von Dohnanyi, on musical pedestals. Enormously shy, Bartok lives in Budapest in extreme quiet with his wife and son. He has an almost inaudible voice, dislikes conversation, has one shy-rude trait. When addressed (in European manner) as maestro or maitre, he replies curtly: "My name is Mr. Bartok." Vigorously anti-Nazi, he will not allow his music, if he can help it, to be broadcast within earshot of Germany or Italy.

*A six-volume collection of 153 piano studies, progressively graded for students: Boosey & Hawkes, Inc. ($1-$1.50 each).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.