When Bartok’s son recorded Dylan Thomas

From the Times obit today of the pioneering audiobook publisher Marianne Mantell:

The famously inebriate Thomas proved difficult to reach. The young women eventually contacted him by phone at the Chelsea Hotel at 5am, as he was stumbling back from a party. After meeting them at a local restaurant, he agreed to come to Steinway Hall on 57th Street to be recorded by their friend Peter Bartók (pictured), son of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók…

Bartók had expected a literary voice but instead heard, in Roney’s words, “a French horn, at times a whole orchestra”, so had to adjust the microphone. Even as Thomas was reading, Roney realised there was something special going on, a poet bringing prose to life in electrifying fashion and giving birth to a new genre — “literature that, like music, must be performed to achieve its real effect”.

Mantell died on January 22, aged 93.