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[Off The Record]
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Yefim Bronfman/Esa-Pekka Salonen/Los Angeles Philharmonic
BARTÓK: PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 1-3
(SONY)

By turns aggressive and lyrical, rigorous and unruly, colorful and severe, Béla Bartók’s piano concertos span his musical personality, and they offer some of his very greatest music. Given their intellectual and technical difficulty, they’ve been well served in recordings, starting with the pioneering readings by Géza Anda and Ferenc Fricsay from 1960. Even so, this reissue of the Bronfman/Salonen recordings from 1995 is more than worth its budget price. Bronfman has the chops to meet the composer’s virtuoso demands, as he demonstrates during the furious Presto in the middle of No. 2. And Salonen and his LA players pick up much of the detail in Bartók’s thorny scoring, like the snarling trombone glissandos in No. 1. Their partnership is most successful in the Third Concerto: they revel in its unabashedly tonal melodies, evocation of nature evocation, and high-spirited Lisztian finale.

In the first two concertos, though, both seem to stand outside the music. That may be due in part to the sound picture, which is a little recessed. Brutal episodes like the distorted, limping march in the first concerto go by a little too smoothly, and I miss the sense of visceral excitement that’s central to these concertos. No one cuts to the violent core of Bartók’s modernism like Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado, and no one captures the roguish humor and playfulness in these works like Peter Donohoe and Simon Rattle. Neither of the above seems to be available in the US, however, so Bronfman and Salonen can stand as a very good recommendation among modern recordings. But listen to the aforementioned Anda/Fricsay versions and you’ll be amazed at the high interpretive standards that were set for these works a mere 15 years after the composer’s death.

BY DAVID WEININGER

Issue Date: October 25 - November 1, 2001





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