Violinist
David Grimal writes that "the aim of this recording is to show how the paths of [
Bartók,
Enesco, and
Janácek] crossed, and to better understand the secrets of their musical languages, which included learned elements from the great European schools as well as elements transmitted by the oral tradition." It's not clear why the fourth composer represented,
Karol Szymanowski, is left off this list at this point (perhaps it is because his Myths for violin and piano, Op. 30, make little use of folk materials), and the notes proceed into a snarl of abstraction and Gallic rhetoric. But the music, all for violin and piano, can speak for itself. What
Grimal shows is that avant-garde ideas and the use of national folk musics in Eastern Europe did not necessarily have to stand in opposition to each other, as they might have in, say, England, but could and did coexist. The chief evidence for this idea so far has been the music of
Bartók, whose student-pianist series Mikrokosmos is full of serial-like pitch sets as well as Bulgarian rhythms and Hungarian folk tunes. But the
Bartók Rhapsody No. 1 for violin and piano, Sz 86, with its succession of dancelike melodies, comes off as the most straightforward of these pieces, as a sort of upbeat finale to the program. The music moves from the personal in tone (
Janácek) to the folkloric in
Enesco and
Bartók. None of it qualifies as "nationalist," "conservative," or "avant-garde"; folk music is exploited for new tonal resources, and new currents in Viennese thought are valued for what they can bring to music rooted in the popular life of smaller countries.
Grimal plays a program that might have been heard in Prague in 1929 or so, but not often since that time. The inward, gnarly emotion of
Janácek, the progressive neo-Romanticism of
Szymanowski, the gypsy intoxication of
Enesco, and the musical ethnography of
Bartók might each have been attached to another program, but they make a great deal of sense together, as part of an impulse on the part of composers from outside the power center of Vienna to mediate between their audiences and what was coming at them from the avant-garde. Consistently absorbing and beautifully recorded.