Bartok,Prokofiev,Rozsa-CONTEMPORARY PIANO SONATAS

Bela Bartok was born on this day in 1881.He died in 1945, aged 64 years.

Bela Bartok composed his Sonata in 1926, the year in which he wrote several important piano works to use on his concert tours in Europe and the United States (...) The Sonata remains the unique example of his thinking in the (solo piano) medium, just as it represents the culmination of the piano music written during the first half of his career.
Throughout the Sonata the piano is treated as a percussion instrument. In the first movement (Allegro moderato) the thematic materials are groups of repeated notes, shot like bullets from a machine-gun and punctuated by booming bass sounds, dissonant harmonics, or clusters of adjacent notes. Or there are fragments of scale passages, flourishes,outcries and chatterings. Everything is carried along on the wave of a powerful rhythmic drive that persists unaltered until the end,where it goes even faster.
The second movement (Sostenuto e pesante) is made of the same kind of material, but in a slow tempo that directs the attention to harmonic matters rather than rhythmic ones, and to the course rather than the speed of events. The music is like an epilogue spoken by an impartial observer of a tragedy.
The last movement (Allegro molto) is based on a folk idea, but it's dynamism is even more elemental, almost primitive. It's structure, on the other hand, is quite complex, and the changes rung on the theme are examples of highly organized rhythmical and melodic variation. Even at a first hearing, the Sonata is an extraordinarily vital and exciting work.But for all its modernity of sound, it is constructed on the soundest principles of classical form.

Contemporary Piano Sonatas

Side One:

a1: Sergei Prokofiev-Sonata No.3 For Piano (1907, rev.1917)

a2-4: Bela Bartok-Sonata For Piano (1926)
1-Allegro Moderato
2-Sostenuto e pesante
3-Allegro molto

Side Two:

b1-3: Miklos Rozsa-Piano Sonata (1948)
1-Calmo
2-Andante con calore
3-Allegro giusto e vigoroso

Leonard Pennario-Piano























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