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18 unusual facts about Béla Bartók


Cal Tjader Plays Harold Arlen

He swipes string-section sounds (icy and twangy by turns) from the moderns, steals chords from Bartók's string quartets, throws in some Hollywood soundtrack stuff, conks on the bare piano strings, and fools around with counter-rhythms.

Claudia Cassidy

She was unfailingly critical of the great Czech conductor Rafael Kubelík, described Janáček's orchestral work Taras Bulba as "trash" and even called Bartók's classic Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta a "potboiler".

Dezső Czigány

They were part of the radical intellectual culture in Budapest in the early 20th century, associated with such poets as Endre Ady and composers as Béla Bartók.

Edmundo Rivero

His three-year tenure there left no recordings (with his Bartók influences, Salgán was too "far out" for the general tango audience) but earned Rivero the respect of avant-garde and jazz musicians.

Ernest Nash

Besides architectural photography he also produced a series of portraits of famous musicians, including Béla Bartók, while he lived in New York City.

Ernst Roth

Besides Kodály and Strawinsky, Roth especially promoted the composers Béla Bartók and Richard Strauss.

EU Talent Day

Conference delegates proposed March 25, birthday of Béla Bartók, as EU TalentDay.

Fjala dhe Muzika

Its first programme was a two-part feature on the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók starting in April 2006.

Friedrich Rückert

Among the composers who set his poetry to music are Schubert, Robert and Clara Schumann, Brahms, Josef Rheinberger, Mahler (song cycles Kindertotenlieder, Rückert-Lieder), Max Reger, Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky, Hindemith, Bartók, Berg, Hugo Wolf and Heinrich Kaspar Schmid.

Imre Varga

He created a wide array of works - ranging from statues of Vladimir Lenin to the Holocaust, to statues of Francis II Rákóczi, Raoul Wallenberg, Sir Winston Churchill and Béla Bartók to Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle.

Iren Marik

Although she studied with composer Béla Bartók and studied at Budapest's Liszt Academy, she fled Hungary after World War II and moved to the United States, where she taught at Sweet Briar College and eventually moved to the small town of Independence, California, outside of Death Valley, where she lived with author Evelyn Eaton.

Jean Coulthard

She studied in the 1930s and early 1940s with such composers as Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, and Arnold Schoenberg.

Károly Kernstok

They worked with such writers and composers included Endre Ady and Béla Bartók.

Kerepesi Cemetery

After the fall of communism, Kerepesi was still considered by some as a Communist cemetery (for example a son of Béla Bartók forbade his father's ashes to be interred there).

Make a Jazz Noise Here

The album is made up mostly of instrumentals, featuring Zappa's own compositions, with some arrangements of Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók themes by his bassist, Scott Thunes.

Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

On the eve of World War II Istanbul was a safe meeting place for many exiled Europeans, a common destination for exiled Germans, and the Schüttes encountered artists such as the musicians Béla Bartók or Paul Hindemith.

Sheikh Hamada

Béla Bartók was extremely touched by the artist on a two year trip to Algeria (1913–1915), which inspired several pieces.

Too Much Blood

The video opens with an excerpt from the first movement of the String Quartet Number 3 by Béla Bartók.


Ahmed Adnan Saygun

The Times called him "the grand old man of Turkish music, who was to his country what Jean Sibelius is to Finland, what Manuel de Falla is to Spain, and what Béla Bartók is to Hungary".

Alexander Zakin

Over the years he performed works by composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Béla Bartók, Ernest Bloch, Johannes Brahms, Claude Debussy, George Frideric Handel, Joseph Haydn, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, Sergei Prokofiev, Robert Schumann, Grigoraș Dinicu, George Enescu, César Franck, Fritz Kreisler, Ottokar Nováček, Gaetano Pugnani, Pablo de Sarasate and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

András Beck

From the 1930s he became well known for his expressionist sculpture, creating plaquettes of Árpád Tóth, Bartók, Móricz, and Thomas Mann.

Andrés Andreani

This absurd story, inspired by Béla Bartók's third piano concerto, counts with the performances of Argentinean actors Martín Piroyansky and Norman Briski.

Béla Balázs

He is perhaps best remembered as the librettist of Bluebeard's Castle which he originally wrote for his roommate Zoltán Kodály, who in turn introduced him to the eventual composer of the opera, Béla Bartók.

Béla Quartet

They were united by their desire both to champion the contemporary repertoire : George Crumb, György Ligeti, Giacinto Scelsi, John Cage, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, Kaija Saariaho, Béla Bartók, Steve Reich, Raphaël Cendo, Marco Stroppa, Henri Dutilleux...

Brodsky Quartet

In addition to performing classical music, and in particular the classic string quartet repertoire of Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Bartók and Shostakovich, they have collaborated with such rock and pop figures as Björk, Elvis Costello and Paul McCartney.

Common practice period

George Perle (1990) has argued that this amounts to "Tradition in 20th Century Music", the most significant element of which is the "shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations," among composers such as Edgard Varèse, Alban Berg, Béla Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, and himself.

Haydn and folk music

Haydn's early biographer Giuseppe Carpani claimed that the adult Haydn even did field work, collecting folk songs from the people as did Bartók and Vaughan Williams over a century later.

Herzog Blaubarts Burg

Herzog Blaubarts Burg ("Duke Bluebeard's Castle") (1963) is a film of the opera Bluebeard's Castle by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, written in 1911 to a symbolist libretto by the poet and later film theorist Béla Balázs.

Interval cycle

Cyclic tonal progressions in the works of Romantic composers such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Wagner form a link with the cyclic pitch successions in the atonal music of Modernists such as Béla Bartók, Alexander Scriabin, Edgard Varèse, and the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern).

Jenny Erpenbeck

After the successful completion of her studies in 1994 (with a production of Béla Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle in her parish church and in the Kunsthaus Tacheles, she spent some time at first as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz, where in 1997 she did her own productions of Schoenberg's Erwartung, Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and a world premiere of her own piece Cats Have Seven Lives.

Jenő Hubay

He also taught many female violinists such as Stefi Geyer, Bartók's first love, to whom he dedicated his first violin concerto; Jelly d'Arányi, Joachim's niece, who was successful in England and France and who collaborated on Maurice Ravel's Tzigane; and Ilona Fehér.

Karel Ančerl

In addition to performances of Czech composers, including Antonín Dvořák, Bedřich Smetana, Leoš Janáček, Bohuslav Martinů and Miloslav Kabeláč, Ančerl is also admired for his interpretations of 20th-century composers, such as Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, as well as the Toronto-based organist/composer Healey Willan.

Katica Illényi

Meanwhile she was invited from classical music circles where she played Béla Bartók, Franz Lehár, Sarasate, Debussy, Saint Sean, Fritz Kreisler, De Falla, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Franz Liszt, Max Bruch, Georg Boulanger, Bach, Vivaldi, Spohr, etc.

Kit Downes

The Trio are inspired by a wide range of influences, ranging from Béla Bartók to Keith Jarrett to Rufus Wainwright.

Kolisch Quartet

Numerous works were written for them by composers including Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, and Béla Bartók.

Móricz Zsigmond körtér

Located in Újbuda, or Budapest's 11th District at the convergence of some of Budapest's major boulevards Béla Bartók ut and Villanyi ut, the square in close proximity to the River Danube.

Musical tuning

Scordatura for the violin was also used in the 19th and 20th centuries in works by Niccolò Paganini, Robert Schumann, Camille Saint-Saëns and Béla Bartók.

Nicolas Koeckert

For the Bavarian Radio Station, the violinist has recorded various pieces like Ballade Sonata for solo violin No. 3 by Eugène Ysaÿe, Edvard Grieg's Sonata in C minor, the Sonata by Maurice Ravel, Valse-Scherzo, Op. 34 and Melody, Op. 42/3 by Tchaikovsky, the Béla Bartók's Solo Sonata, Antonio Bazzini's Dance of the Goblins, Sibelius and the Second Violin Concerto of Karol Szymanowski.

Richard Buhlig

He gave the American premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's Op. 11 and performed pieces by other European modernists such as Ferruccio Busoni, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály and Claude Debussy.

Unified field

In Béla Bartók's Bagatelles, and several of Alfredo Casella's Nine Piano Pieces such as No. 4 'In Modo Burlesco' the close intervallic relationship between motive and chord creates or justifies the great harmonic dissonance.

Univers Zero

Obvious early influences were Bartók and Stravinsky, however the band also cited less well known composers such as Albert Huybrechts, who was also Belgian.