Bela Bartok Interview & Concert from the Ask the Composer series

An interview with Bela Bartok, in English, at the the Brooklyn Museum sculpture garden as part of the Ask The Composer series at the museum. Ditta Pasztory (Bartok's wife) played piano-solo pieces and the piano part in the Tibor Serly transcription for piano and strings by Mikrokosmos. David LaVita is the commentator/interviewer and musicologist employed by the museum, and his questions referred to music played by Ditta. Bartok speaking first discussed the Sonatina, then the Suite op. 14 and the innovations in his compositions for the piano of the mid-1910s, going on to the first Rondo (mistakenly speaking of 1932 instead of 1927), the two themes of Evening in Transylvania which are in the style of Hungarian folk songs, and finally Mikrokosmos. This was part of several part series from the Brooklyn Museum. With Tibor Serly on piano there is a performance with a string quartet of a selection from the Mikrokosmos-suite. The complete text of the Levita-Bartok interview was published in Studia Musicologica 11, 1969, pp. 253-257.

WNYC archives id: 10977