Janos Karpati

Of all the 20th century's musical transformers - Mahler, Schoenberg, Janacek, Stravinsky, Shostakovich - Bartok is the least discussed, the least central to world culture. Since the last flurry of activity in 1981 for the centenary of his birth, no orchestra outside Hungary has showcased his music, no reinterpretation has quickened international attention.

In reputational retreat, a composer gets stuck in time and place. For Bartok, this was 1930s Budapest: a hillside home, a surge of new scores, all the honours he could covet in a fascist state that grew nastier by the month.

In 1940, after his mother died, he forswore comfort and sailed to America where, five years later, he died indigent.

He wrote only two works in exile - the Concerto for Orchestra and an unaccompanied sonata for Yehudi Menuhin. The majority of his music is rooted in Budapest.

Bartok was a remote man, unknowable to close friends, perhaps even to his two wives, both of them expupils. Much of his music is rebarbative, his texts Hungarian. Though obviously important, his is not an art that is easily assimilated, not a music that thrills at first hearing.

For half a century it was championed by powerful compatriots in exile - Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia, Fritz Reiner in Chicago, Georg Szell in Cleveland; Ferenc Fricsay in Berlin; Antal Dorati in London and Washington, Georg Solti in London and Chicago.

After Stravinsky, the 20th century's foremost composer was Bela Bartok, whose music underwent a similar transformation as he grew older: the harsh idiom of his middle period gradually gave way to a more lyrical style firmly rooted in tonal tradition. The violent dissonances of the Fourth Quartet, for instance, are "resolved" in the Fifth Quartet, a marvel of musical architecture whose five movements are arranged in the composer's preferred "arch" form. The Fifth Quartet is no easy nut to crack, but for all the spikiness of its harmonic language, the listener is never in doubt of Bartok's fundamental acceptance of the natural law of tonality, proclaimed in the unison B flats of the very first bar.… (plus d'informations)