Dance Suite Bartok

Daniel Hope has long been fascinated by the power of dance to move and inspire. Taking listeners on a journey through seven centuries of music history, his latest Deutsche Grammophon album – DANCE! – celebrates the rhythms that have set bodies in motion and lifted hearts since time began. A magical, passionate, pulsating tour through history, Daniel Hope’s Dance! runs the gamut of western classical music from medieval times to the late 20th century. Dance touches everybody’s lives, and has always been deeply intertwined with music – as you can hear in Hope’s thoughtfully curated collection which spans seven centuries, including everything from a 14th-century lament to Wojciech Kilar’s 1986 work Orawa, via classics by Handel, Saint-Saëns, Florence Price, Duke Ellington, and many others.

Will Wynton's omnivorous appetite ever be satisfied? Seemingly enthralled with the string quartets of Bartók, he tries to write one of his own that basically takes off upon Bartók's (and America's Charles Ives') own methods of drawing upon vernacular language to create thoroughly contemporary classical music. While Bartók's inspiration was Hungarian folk music, Marsalis, like Ives, seems to draw upon American fiddle tunes and blues.

Bartók’s ‘The Miraculous Mandarin’ (published as ‘A Pantomime in One Act’) was composed at a time of violent unrest in Hungary. The Soviet Hungarian Republic had collapsed in 1919 and was replaced by an ultra-nationalist regime which persecuted communists, Jews and leftists and left over 1,500 dead and thousands imprisoned without trial.

After her critically acclaimed recordings of Mozart (complete sonatas), Schumann and Schubert, Hungarian-born Klára Würtz turns to her compatriot Béla Bartók, presenting a representative selection of his piano works. She plays a powerful, rhythmically vital yet never “pounding’ Sonata, a colourful and vibrant Suite Op. 14, an uncompromising Allegro Barbaro, and a selection of pieces from Mikrokosmos and Gyermekeknek (For Children).