Renata Cortez Sica plays Bartok: Ten Easy Pieces Sz. 39
Ten Easy Pieces was originally entitled Eleven Piano Recital Pieces. The eleventh piece eventually became one of the Fourteen Bagatelles. While the work was published as Ten Easy Pieces, it really consists of eleven pieces: Bartók had been required by a contractual obligation with his publisher to produce eleven pieces, and so also included a Dedication along with the other ten pieces. They were intended, as Bartók himself noted, as a "complement to the Bagatelles," and their purpose was to "supply piano students with easy contemporary pieces." The Fourteen Bagatelles are decidedly more challenging than the Ten Easy Pieces; however, both pieces are very important in the context of Bartók's stylistic development, as they reflect a change in direction for the composer.
Like the Bagatelles, Ten Easy Pieces contains many of the stylistic idioms that characterize Bartók's later works, including the use of folk tunes, pentatonic scales, modes, spare, open textures, and novel harmonies. As with so many of this pieces dating from this period, the Ten Easy Pieces reveals not only Bartók's interest in folk song, but also his recent discovery of the music of Claude Debussy, whose experimental harmonies would play an important role in Bartók's development as a composer and in his desire to synthesize the music of East and West. The Ten Easy Pieces are also, like the Bagatelles, often linked to the iconoclastic Viennese atonalist Arnold Schoenberg and his Op. 11 Klavierstücke; however, Bartók's work antedates Schoenberg's, and is arguably more progressive than Schoenberg's then- scandalous music.
Ostinato figures are prevalent in these little pieces, sometimes constructed out of dissonant intervals. There are also bitonal passages in some of the pieces, although a number of Bartók's folk-inspired melodies are set with simple chords, or occasionally appear in unison. Of the eleven pieces in this collection, only two are settings of true ethnic folk songs; the other nine are "original" folk tunes by Bartók, whose vast knowledge of folk idioms allowed him to create melodies in his own "authentic" folk idiom.
© All Music Guide [ Ссылка ]
0. Dedicatória
1. Canção dos Camponeses
2. Frustração
3. Dança do Garoto Eslovaco
4. Sostenuto
5. Noite na Transilvânia
6. Canção Folclórica Húngara
7. Amanhecer
8. Canção Folclórica Eslovaca
9. Exercício para os Cinco Dedos
10. Dança do Urso
