Did Bartók do klezmer?
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Did Bartók play klezmer? The Hungarian composer enthused over many authentic forms of folk music and spent his summers tracking them down across the Balkans, the Iberian peninsula and north Africa. Later, exiled in America in 1938, Bartók composed Contrasts for the Jewish jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman, who played it without inflection or schmalz as if he were a country vicar somewhere in Virginia.
This interpretation changes everything…
En francais ici.
All sounds perfectly reasonable. Klezmer music’s natural habitat was not too far from Bartok’s. Also, jewish traditional musicians were not ignorant of mainstream music playing. Many of the great violin masters grew up in such environment. The shift from traditional Jewish music to classical music came naturaly for singers as well: The late Abraham Kaplan came from a dynasty of experts in traditional Jewish singing.
Many Jewish musicians have played Bartok without shmaltz, as did the composer himself.
An enticing review; thanks for drawing attention to the album. I’ll have to give it a close listen. As for Goodman’s uninflected reading of the part, I would have expected him to take the lead from Szigeti on violin, who certainly understood the folk inspirations of “Contrasts” (no matter how shrouded by the austerity of the composition).
Let’s remember the peculiar position Goodman found himself in at the time — he had not really started to explore the classical repertoire and the classical style of playing as he was to do in later years, so he had few if any bona fides with the classical music establishment, and at the time I suspect there was a strong whiff of condescension coming from that establishment. (Goodman’s lessons with Reginald Kell were a decade and more into the future.) True, about that same time he recorded the Mozart Quintet with the Budapest String Quartet and acquitted himself pretty well, but just a year before that had suffered a humiliating experience trying to record the same piece with the Pro Arte Quartet.
And for the “classical” works he played by Copland, Bernstein, Stravinsky and Morton Gould, they met him more on his turf — the king of swing turf — with varying degrees of success. Goodman never lacked for self-confidence but I think with the Bartók (the music, not the man) he felt he had something to prove to an audience that did not like him, and perhaps was just that much inhibited by the situation, and perhaps even a little by the reputations of his famous colleagues.
Stated another way I think the music critics and classical establishment at the time would have come down on Goodman like a ton of bricks had he attempted to explore any Klezmer or proto-jazz elements in the Rumanian portions of Contrasts, even if the composer had urged him to do so (Bartók freely admitted that he had been influenced by the “blues” movement of the Ravel violin sonata in writing Contrasts).