Bela Bartok (Бела Барток)

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BARTÓK: The Miraculous Mandarin - 2 Portraits PROKOFIEV: Scythian Suite



The two works by Bartók recorded here come at the beginning and the end of the decade of his first maturity: the Two Portraits date form 1907-08 in conception, the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin from 1918-19. As it was with Schoenberg at very much the same time, this was the period of Bartók's richest and most turbulent music, music in which the old checks have been released and new ones not yet applied. It was also, significantly, the period of Bartok's three works for the stage, all one-acters: the opera Bluebeard's Castle and the ballet The Wooden Prince, both psychological dramas in fairy-tale settings, and finally The Miraculous Mandarin, where again a principal theme is the apartness of the human individual, but where the locationis changed to a modern city.
The Two Portraits are also concerned with a passionate, mysterious liaison, one between Bartók and the 19-year-old Hungarian violinist Stefi Greyer.
In 1914 Prokofiev graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory and went immediately to London, where the Ballets Russes were appearing. He saw their Stravinsky productions; he also played his Second Piano Concerto to Diagilev, who was impressed enough to commission a new score evidently intended to repeat the success of The Rite of Spring, which the company had introduced the year before. The scenario was created by Sergei Gorodetsky, one of whose poems had provided an important stimulus to The Rite, and Prokofiev's music draws on Stravinsky's score for its thumping pulsations, its pentatonic and modal melodic character, and what it contains of dense, stubbornly moving harmony.
But the new ballet, Alla and Lolly, was never performed, and Prokofiev put the music immediately into a concert suite, the Scythian Suite, which he conducted at its première in Petrograd in 1916.

BELA BARTÓK (1881-1945)
The Miraculous Mandarin op. 19
1) Beginning (1:17)
2) The curtain rises (1:33)
3) First seduction game: the shabby old rake (3:46)
4) Second seduction game (1:11)
5) The shy youth appears at the door (1:38)
6) Third seduction game (1:27)
7) The Mandarin enters (2:25)
8) The girl's dance (4:34)
9) She flees from him: he chases her wildly (1:12)
10) The Mandarin stumbles, but catches the girl; they fight. The tramps leap out, seize the Mandarin, rob him and suffocate him with pillows (2:47)
11) Suddenly the Mandarin's head appears. The tramps drag him out, one stabs him three times. He almost collapses, but draws himself up and leaps at the girl (3:16)
12) They drag the Mandarin to the centre of the room and hang him on a lamp hook. The lamp falls to the floor - goes out. The Mandarin's body begins to glow (2:51)
13) The tramps take him down. He falls to the floor and at once leaps at the girl. They embrace (1:04)
14) His longing stilled, the Mandarin's wounds begins to bleed; he becomes weaker and dies (1:01)
CLAUDIO ABBADO
LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Ambrosian Singers
Chorus Master: John McCarthy

Two Portraits op. 5
15) I. One Ideal (10:09)
16) II. One Grotesque (2:08)
CLAUDIO ABBADO
LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Shlomo Mintz, violin

SERGE PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)
Scythian Suite op. 20
17) I. The adoration of Veless and Ala (5:37)
18) II. The Enemy God and the dance of the Spirits of Darkness (3:11)
19) III. Night (6:11)
20) IV. The glorious departure of Lolly and the Sun's procession (5:32)
CLAUDIO ABBADO
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

1978 (Prokofiev), 1983 (Bartók) Polydor International GmbH, Hamburg
1 CD DDD (Bartók) - ADD (Prokofiev)
410 598-2 GH

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