Customer Reviews

The Bartok Album

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This newest Muzsikas album includes 4 excelent elements:

- Bela Bartok's genius for documenting folk melodies

- Muzsikas orchestra whish reproduces traditional music with passion

- guest star Marta Sebastian, passionate voice to reveale sadness from Transilvania

- and last but not least - Alexander Balanescu, precious performer and great experimentator.

I was lucky enough to see the concert in Budapest. May 2000, where many songs from "The Bartok Album" were introduced. On the recording it is possible to hear only the echo of the stomping dance that gives the rythm to the music, and you can only imagine antiend and rude instruments that, played together with virtuose violine, compose timeless tunes that Bartok saved from extintion.

Still, the advantage that CD has over the live performance are recordings from the museum archives, valuable historical docuemntation of traditional music from Hungary and Romania, as well as very well equiped booklet with descritions and translations of many songs.

Highly recomended album, that offers diverse types of joy - to listen, to read and to dance along :-)

An absolutely stellar recording! It simply doesn't get any better than this in terms of musicianship, vocals, performance quality or ethnomusicological value.

A sort of concept album, Muzsikas and Marta Sebestyen perform some serious musical detective work in The Bartok Album, juxtaposing original phonograph field recordings from a century ago by Bartok himself alongside excerpts from his works which clearly reflect these folkloric influences. Finally, we are treated with Muzsikas' own renditions of these classic folk pieces, executed with the perfect mix of flawless technique and earthy exuberance, not to mention the magnificent haunting vocals of Sebestyen.

Particularly intriguing are the swineherd and shepherd songs, among the most ancient styles in the Carpathian Basin. The long flute on the Shepherd's Flute Song, beautifully played by Zoltan Juhasz, has an ethereal otherworldly quality and contrasts most favourably with the spirited ugros dances that precede it. The carefully chosen clips from Bartok's musical archives clearly show the link between his field recordings and subsequent compositions, such that the listener gets an idea of just how influential folkloric elements were in Bartok's work. Fascinating for anyone with even a casual interest in Bartok, ethnomusicology, or the unique musical styles found in Transdanubia and Transylvania, or just for anyone who needs a frenetic folk-dancing workout.

All in all, an absolutely top-notch album in every sense of the word, and highly recommended to any fan of great music!

One day, in adventurous mood and tired of RAWK, I decided it was time to investigate Gypsy fiddle music and stumbled onto this CD (who says you can't judge a CD by the cover art?). It became my happiest discovery in years. There's nothing hokey about the performance of these re-worked folk tunes; the album is passionate and exhuberant and visceral, and the violin work often soars into the stratosphere.

I've seen other reviewers express disappointment that the ensemble didn't perform/arrange the work in the fashion Bartok himself would have, ie, classical mode, but that would have diluted the whole point: the people who performed the songs for the Bartok's microphone (clips of the original field recordings Bartok made are presented inbetween the modern renditions) didn't make music for upper-crust performance halls and Sony Classical, they played it in the intimacy of their everyday lives and communities. By presenting the songs in this context, the album reminds us of a time and place when popular music had real communal value not measured in units sold.

Muzsikás and Sebestyén performed this material in Boston this month (November 2008) in collaboration with the excellent Takács Quartet. Takács played Bartok, Muzsikás and Sebestyén played the folk tunes that Bartok had collected, and snips of Bartok's own recordings were played over the loudspeakers -- first alternating whole pieces, then, by the end, trading off phrases and riffs in a delirious fusion of folk musicians, Muzsikás and Sebestyén playing the folk music at a professional level, and Takács presenting the distilled and transformed art that Bartok made of the folk material. A never-to-be-forgotten concert, a profound essay on what music is about, and an unbeatable tribute to Bartok and to the richness of Hungarian folk music traditions.

This appears to be the most recent CD from the leading Táncház ("dance house") musical ensemble, who kickstarted the Hungarian revival of folk music in later decades-- much as Bartók pioneered it earlier last century. Excellent liner notes by the group narrate the classical musician's determination to expose middle classes in Europe to folk traditions that the urban audiences had forgotten even existed. Like Zoltán Kodály within Hungary at the same time, Bartók went into the field, with primitive recording equipment, to capture what enchanted him. This disc recreates what he found: snippets of found sound, variations on the original themes that Bartók would have heard as played by Muzsikás and friends, and their elaborations that as dances and violin duos would have inspired Bartók's own Romanian- and Hungarian-based classical works.

The marvelous singer Márta Sebestyén can capture the ranges of many female vocalists from a variety of regional styles. Her voice, although I prefer it on the band's own records when it's smoother, here tends towards a harsher, more staccato, rougher texture. She's reproducing the delivery of the rawer ethnic heritages. The band's often playing one or two instrumentalists rather than as a full line-up on many tracks; they are often accompanied by featured Romanian violinist Alexander Balanescu. The addition of the cimbalom and percussion from Gypsy or Rom influences colors some songs, as typical of many Hungarian albums.

For me, track 15 (see Amazon for the Magyar-English renderings of these title) stands out. It's sweet, to the point of heartbreaking. Following this, tracks 16-19 show how Bartók may have found source material that led to his Violin Duo #44. The classical versions that the composer produced, by the way, as played on tour in recent years by Muzsikás with the Tákacs Quartet are not included on this CD. This would certainly be welcome, however, for a follow-up from a band that's been has not been heard from with "old-new" material in the West this past decade.

It's the simpler, more plangent, and rather primitive vibrancy within much of the contents here that endures. As the band concludes its note, they share their countryman's fascination with their land's musical legacy: rather than a musicologist's dissection, their tribute album returns to the same sources that refreshed the composer. They wonder: "what is it in folk music, that attracted Bartók like a magnet? It is a question that applies equally to ourselves."

Love this album. Was over in Hungary a few years ago and heard this type of music playing in a museum from original people of the region.