The six works in Sonya Bach’s collection are well-chosen to provide a handy guide to the evolution of Bartók’s piano music, from its Lisztian beginnings in the early years of the 20th century, through its celebration of the wealth of his native Hungarian folk music to the expressionist power of his writing for the instrument in the 1920s.
Those roots in late Romanticism are laid bare in the Four Piano Pieces from 1903, and in many ways it’s the work that shows Bach’s pianism off to best advantage, revealing a subtlety of touch and keyboard colour that she doesn’t allow herself in the later music. In pieces such as the Three Studies of 1918 or the Piano Sonata, which appeared eight years later, there’s a relentless, unremitting quality to her playing, which may reflect one important aspect of Bartók’s writing, but which even at its most extreme doesn’t tell the whole story, despite the obvious technical mastery she shows in projecting it.
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