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Bartok and the Piano: a Performer''s View.

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By Barbara Nissman. Lanhan, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002. [xiii, 319. p. ISBN 081084301-3. $49.95.] Music examples, bibliography, indexes, compact disc.

Since the Hungarian composer B,la Bart>k (1881--1945) was a virtuoso pianist, it is hardly surprising that his works for piano reflect the entire evolution of his musical style. These works range from his adolescent, unpublished four-movement sonata (1898) that has "the heaviness of Brahms, the octaves of Liszt, and the pomposity of Wagner" (p. 3); to increasingly folk-inspired, atmospheric pieces such as the Improvisations (1920); to mid-career works such as his Piano Sonata and Out of Doors (1926), featuring the percussive, martellato style for which he has been unfairly stereotyped; to the crystalline Third Piano Concerto, written in the last months of Iris life (1945), a work that "achieves a true classical simplicity" (p. 250). While Bart>k's collection of teaching pieces, Mikrokosmos, is often cited as a "microcosm" of all the compositional techniques he used in his piano works, it is fair to say that Bart>k's entire piano output is likewise a microcosm of his entire oeuvre. To delve deeply into the piano works is to gain insight into Bart>k's extraordinary string quartets and orchestral works as well.

Pianist Barbara Nissman is the ideal performer/scholar to provide such an indepth study of Bart>k's complete output for piano. Nissman established herself in the 1980s as a champion of the piano music of Alberto Ginastera, recording his complete piano music in 1989 (Globe GLO 5006 [1988], 3 CDs) that won nominations for Record of the Year from both Gramophone and American Record Guide. Her subsequient recordings of the nine piano sonatas of Sergey Prokofiev have received the highest praise,...

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