Bartók: Sonata for Solo Violin, Sz 117

Béla Bartók’s music for the violin occupies an important position in his creative output. The instrument attracted him at intervals throughout his career, from the Andante of 1902 to the magnificently disciplined Sonata for Violin Solo, written in 1944. Norwegian Elise Bĺtnes, newly appointed concertmaster of the Oslo Philharmonics, makes her international debut release as a soloist with a selection of these phenomenal works, revealing a mature interpreter and an outstanding violinist.

The earliest surviving work by Bartók for violin and piano is the Andante in A major composed in 1902 while he was a student at the Budapest Academy of Music. It seems to have been written for a fellow-student destined for fame as a violinist, namely Adila d’Aranyi, niece of Joseph Joachim. The work was written as a kind of friendly message on a series of six postcards. The Sonata in E minor was written only one year later, but it reveals a more ambitious composer audibly inspired by both the virtuosity of Liszt, Hungarian folk music, the chromatic harmony of Richard Strauss and the violin sonatas of Brahms.

Bartók and Kodály, as professional ethnomusicologists, uncovered the old, authentic Hungarian folk music by going into the countryside with a phonograph and recording the actual melodies people sang and danced to. They published their first joint collection of folksongs in 1906, and Bartók published his piano pieces entitled “For Children” in 1909. In 1931 Bartók transcribed several numbers under the title Hungarian Folk Songs for violin and piano. Bartók’s Sonata for unaccompanied violin was one of his last compositions. It was written early in 1944 for Yehudi Menuhin, who had begun to emerge as a notable interpreter of Bartók’s violin music. The composer worked on the piece in close collaboration with Menuhin, who gave the world premiere in New York on 26 November 1944 and subsequently edited the score for publication.