Béla Bartók - Dance Suite (piano version - 1925)

Описание: Béla Bartók composed the Dance Suite as an orchestral work in 1923 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the union of the cities Buda and Pest to form the Hungarian capital Budapest. After its great success, he was commissioned to write a "reduction", an arrangement for piano, which was published in 1925.

Bartók himself never performed the piano version in a public recital - the arrangement was premiered in March 1945, a few months before his death, by his friend György Sándor.

The work consists of five dances with Arabic, Wallachian (Romanian) and Hungarian melodies, and a finale that brings together all of the previous thematic sketches.

There was one more movement, omitted by the composer according to his mathematical principles*, which would have been placed between the second and the third movements. This movement, the Slovakian Dance, was finally dismissed and remained unorchestrated. However, the first, second and fourth movements contain thematic references to this piece towards the end of each one of them. Bartók felt that placing it in the Suite would have ruined the proportion of the whole work.

Since Dance Suite was an orchestral suite, the Slovakian Dance remained as a sketch, unpublished and unorchestrated, until his son, Peter Bartók, made slight changes for it to be published in 1999.

Béla Bartók - Dance Suite (piano version - 1925)

I - Moderato
II - Allegro molto - 3:48
III - Allegro vivace - 6:09
IV - Molto tranquillo - 8:58
V - Comodo - 12:05
VI - Finale - Allegro - 13:05

Gabor Gabos, piano


Some music scholars analyze Béla Bartók's works as being based on two opposing systems, that of the golden ratio and the acoustic scale - other composers such as Satie, Debussy, and Chopin are also said to have used the golden ratio in their compositions.

BTW - this info is courtesy Wikipedia and the Bartók Archives of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute for Musicology.