Our musical offering for Sundays in November will be Béla Bartók’s wonderful “Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta”, one of the four movements per week.
“Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta” was composed in 1936, & was given its premiere performance in Basel, Switzerland on January 21, 1937 by the Basler Kammerorchester, conducted by Paul Sacher. The version I’ll be using on the blog is the 1989 recording by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Levine.
In the first movement, Andante tranquillo, Bartók gives us a fugue with the tone center of A. Themes that are presented in the first movement continue to be explored through the rest of the work. As is the case with all four movements, there is no time signature given for the Andante tranquillo. For more about this composition, please see the AllMusic entry &/or the Wikipedia page.
Image links to its source on Wiki Commons:
Celesta belonging to Stetson University.
Contributed and licensed under the GFDL by the photographer, Gregory Maxwell.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 only as published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.
Definite Bartók fan here. Good choice of music for this series!
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