Béla Bartók composed 44 short duos for two violins, initially for use in an educational method. Their musical rigor makes them suitable for concert performance, and a new recording with violinist Alexandra Preucil and violist Antoine Tamestit intersperses the duos with the original field recordings of the folk source material made by Bartók over a century ago. KBACH's Michael Keelan talked with both players. More information is at Harmonia Mundi.
Michael Keelan: This is KBACH’s First Take, and I'm Michael Keelan. I'm talking with violinist Alexandra Preucil and violist Antoine Tamestit about their new album of Bartók's 44 Duos. They're originally for two violins, but of course here are played on violin and viola. Welcome to First Take.
Alexandra Preucil: Nice to be here. Hello.
Michael Keelan: How did you come to arrange these duos?
Alexandra Preucil: Actually, not much of an arrangement. We started playing for fun in our free time and realized with each one, we could play them as written, just choosing which instrument gave the best color to which line. So, we trade between the first and second lines on each individual piece, but they're actually just as Bartók wrote.
Antoine Tamestit: Yes, and also we felt that there was always one voice that was clearly a lower, darker, Big Brother voice in the duo, and maybe that was the voice destined to the teacher. Because those pieces were educational, and so there was always a teacher-student relationship, and I find that somehow there was always a voice perfectly fitting to the viola sound.
Michael Keelan: And Bartók famously wrote a Viola Concerto, so it's not hard to conceive of the tone color he had in mind. Bartók had specified the published set in order of difficulty, and you made them into sort of a recital program. How did you choose the order?
Antoine Tamestit: Actually, we found information looking back at a concert that happened in Budapest in I think 1932, where apparently Béla Bartók himself had a preferred order, or maybe more of a performance order, starting with 44, the very last one, and then moving to a fairy tale, making a real order like a sonata or a little suite, with a fast movement, a slow movement. And we found information for the whole, basically the whole 44 Duos in a very beautiful musical order. So, we tried to follow Bartók's wishes there.
Michael Keelan: You're an ensemble together that performs other music, too. So, when you add the Bartók to your recitals, do you take subsets or groupings from the order you chose on your album and put them into live performances, or do you create something else entirely?
Alexandra Preucil: Yes and yes! It's been really fun for each recital to choose what we share—definitely taking sets of the Bartók duos, but most recently, we've been adding Bach Inventions side-by-side that sort of mimic in style or key area the Bartók duos. And so we actually are performing that here in Orcas Island Festival tonight, and we also played last night. And some of the audience was really interested, and some also were like, "Which was the Bach, and which was the Bartók?" There's such a parallel in it, and as they were both educational and teaching things in spirit, we find the pairing works both from a historical standpoint and a musical standpoint.
Michael Keelan: Do you find that there are many moments in the Bartók duos where it's clearly apparent just looking at the page, "This is string music"?
Antoine Tamestit: Yes. Yes and no. I mean, it's really incredible how sometimes he goes beyond the instrument. We have an example of two of the duos which were not based on folk music per se: the "Bagpipe" duo, which is Bartók's own imagination of what a bagpipe might sound, and I think he does that perfectly with the two string instruments playing double stops, holding the sound, and you really, in the mix, only in the mix of the two instruments, hear the bagpipe. And then the "Pizzicato" duo, which probably is a way to imitate two kinds of guitars or banjos or small plucked instruments. And I think he goes really beyond the instruments themselves and make his own imagination of the color. And then, of course, most of them are folk songs, so there is a way of Bartók to really imitate the voice. And for that, I think our studying of the actual recordings that Bartók did really helped us to see the inflections of the voice, the intonation of the voice, the emotions of the voice, and put that into string playing. But I would go beyond and say it's not just string playing, but really musical education and on how to play music, how to phrase music, how to sing music.
Michael Keelan: As you mentioned, most of these have some type of folk music involved as a source. And if there's one thing that every music history student learns about Bartók, it's that he went out into the field and collected recordings of folk songs that are now over a hundred years old, and you include many of these on the album. I had not heard these before. Of course, I knew about them for a long time. But how were these recordings when you first heard them compared to what you expected them to be?
Alexandra Preucil: Oh, we were so lucky to find and have the chance to listen to so many of them. I guess they really struck us with how much they conveyed what Bartók was trying to get across in the limited version we have of notating music. So, it just opened up a whole another world from what was on the page. We chose to select only some of them for the album just because the condition of many of them are just not so comfortable to listen to. So, we tried to share the very best and clean—clean them even additionally—for our listeners so that they could really get the experience in a way that paralleled what we were playing.
Antoine Tamestit: We studied each of them, and almost all the duos have a corresponding recording, and so we really worked and studied on every details. But, of course, I think one takes these recordings, and for the audience to really listen to that and not be too shocked at the old quality, we just wanted to give a few examples as a kind of journey through time. I think we have 12 recordings there, and they're really very clear on how you recognize the theme, the melody, and we just wanted to give a little touch of traveling through time and doing what Bartók did more than a hundred years ago.
Michael Keelan: Some of those recordings are instrumental as well as singing. And I know, Alexandra, you have a background in dance, and classical music dances are often kind of notorious for not being danceable. How practical do you find the dances in these Bartók duos to be? Did he keep closely to material that someone could actually dance to?
Alexandra Preucil: Well, one of our research trips to Budapest included going and visiting one of the dance houses. And so while they weren't playing specifically these duos to be danced to, we did watch typical Hungarian rhythm and folk musicians play, and people of the community and of all ages come and do these both individual and group dances with such joy and ease and freedom that suddenly—I mean, I don't know all the steps myself, but it felt completely danceable. So, sometimes these sort of, you know, not traditional 4/4 or 3/4 rhythms might throw off your traditional ballet dancer, which is my background, but these local Hungarian folk dance people just made it seem completely accessible and normal and just very human. I think the whole project for us really was releasing the structure and framework that we get put into with a classical music education and going beyond that, and just really feeling music from its core origin of expression.
Antoine Tamestit: We have an example, a fun example of the "Pillow Dance," I think it's duo number 14, which we wondered, you know, what is a pillow dance? And then actually you find the information even on YouTube, example of women dancing in a circle holding a pillow over their head. And there is an uplifting joy in this kind of dancing that we try to find, and the stomping of the feet in this dance we try to find also. So, every single one was research, and I think you are right in saying that the body movement is important. It has to feel that, you know, it moves people, any people.
Michael Keelan: You mentioned the title of one dance, and usually titles are meant to clarify the expression of a piece. Just speaking personally, having taught these pieces, I found that sometimes students were almost more confused by the titles in that it didn't fit their conception of what a wedding song or a New Year's song, for example, might sound like. How do you think listeners should understand these titles? And you gave one example: they should watch what the dance looks like.
Alexandra Preucil: Yes, definitely! We found there's such a sense of nostalgia, and the Hungarian—unfortunately, I mean, I'm Hungarian by citizenship, but I don't speak the language—but the sort of way of storytelling and looking at life has this bittersweet, nostalgic essence. And I think that's what we found in the stories that are maybe a little less expected, like the wedding song, or some of the New Year's celebrations being a little bit different than, you know, Times Square at midnight, but there's something really beautiful and poignant in those for us.
Antoine Tamestit: We both got very touched by one legend in particular, a wedding legend, which we learned in a shop where they sold all this cultural fabrics that have a lot of flowers sewn onto them. And there is a legend of the future bride trying to find flowers in the winter for her future husband, not finding flowers because of the winter, and deciding to start sewing many flowers onto her dress or a tablecloth. And this is a very poignant story that we both got very touched by, and then we found directly one of the wedding songs clearly was that song and that storytelling. And so, I think with each one of them, you have to be open-minded to a different time, a different culture, and beautiful, mysterious storytelling.
Michael Keelan: The new album is the 44 Bartók Duos with Alexandra Preucil and Antoine Tamestit. Thanks very much for talking on First Take today.
Alexandra Preucil: Thanks for having us.
Antoine Tamestit: Thank you.