BELA BARTOK FOR VIOLIN

Those composer anniversaries we seem continually to be observing don’t necessarily prove their worth during the actual banner year. It is ultimately more important to plant the seeds for lasting popularity than to give a composer a year in the sun and then return him to his previous, hardly exalted position.

Take the case of Bela Bartok. The year 1981 marked the centennial of his birth. The festivities were big stuff in his native Hungary, which was less sympathetic when he most needed encouragement. But then worldly success, if not a measure of fame, eluded him in all climes, at all times of his life.

Elsewhere, “Celebrating Bartok” (we no longer merely play someone’s music) four years ago meant lots of live performances--and a few more recordings--of the Concerto for Orchestra, which has never lacked for exposure, and more than the usual number of quartet cycles. Hungaroton of Budapest finished its project of recording all of Bartok’s published (and some unpublished) works, a laudable effort that, by its very scope and massiveness, didn’t make it beyond the shelves of academic libraries.

But to anyone who follows such matters, it becomes plain that Bartok’s music has been more frequently encountered since 1981--if not in the concert hall, then certainly among the new recordings.

A stunning version of Bartok’s 1938 Violin Concerto, which circulated very briefly in this country when first issued in 1954, has resurfaced as an inexpensive French EMI import (C 051-01322).

The performers are violinist Yehudi Menuhin and conductor Wilhelm Furtwaengler--the latter, lest we forget, among Bartok’s earliest champions.

This is not a typical majestic-eccentric Furtwaengler production. His leadership of the splendid Philharmonia Orchestra is, to be sure, broadly paced. But in addition to weight and breadth, there is an impassioned vitality, no doubt a response to Menuhin’s long experience and insight into the composer’s work.

As in their Beethoven and Brahms collaborations, Menuhin and Furtwaengler form a hugely communicative partnership, and the 30-plus-year-old recorded sound is beyond cavil.

One might think a just-released edition of the same work, from merely mortal executants, would be hopelessly outclassed. But Simon Rattle, with a more recent incarnation of the Philharmonia Orchestra, proves also to be a sensitive Bartokian in another attractively priced release (London Jubilee 414 531).

Rattle’s tempos throughout are slower than Furtwaengler’s. But he too maintains rhythmic tension, and projects a quite astonishing wealth of detail in the Andante.

Iona Brown, the soloist, is not the commanding artist--in tone or technique--that Menuhin was 30 years ago. But she does play expressively, above all in the slow movement.

The other Bartok Violin Concerto, an early (1908) indiscretion suppressed by the composer during his lifetime, turned out at its belated premiere, in 1958, to be a treasure: ecstatic after the fashion of Richard Strauss rather than Bela Bartok, perhaps, but exquisitely melodious and heartfelt.

The First Concerto appears now in an incomparably fine recording which has had to wait 21 years for its U.S. release, a French Chant du Monde pressing (LDX 78730), distributed in this country by the ever-alert Harmonia Mundi group.

David Oistrakh is the soloist, with the U.S.S.R. Radio Symphony conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Their music making is of the most exalted order, Oistrakh’s singing tone and finely gauged vibrato never more persuasively--or appropriately--employed.

The overside is of comparable interest: the 1939 Hindemith Violin Concerto by the same performers.

Bartok is not only the property of the rich and famous, as witness the display of dexterity and intelligence brought to the composer’s two duo sonatas by the unheralded American team of violinist Ralph Evans and pianist Philip Evans. The liner notes for this release, on the tiny, Nashville-based Gasparo label (GS-255), fail to mention how, or indeed if, the two Evanses are related.

The sonatas, both dating from the early 1920s, are among the composer’s most abstruse and challenging creations. The Evanses play with becoming fieriness, but also musically, as opposed to the scratching and banging that usually passes for idiomatic interpretations of these works.

Bartok’s remaining major work for violin, the tense, melancholy 1944 Sonata for Violin Solo, was written (for Yehudi Menuhin) at a time when its composer was otherwise reaching out to a wider audience (and potentially greater financial rewards) with the Concerto for Orchestra and Third Piano Concerto.

In what is easily the best of several currently available recorded versions, the Swiss violinist Hansheinz Schneeberger (who gave the premiere of the First Concerto in 1958) plays the Sonata with terrific panache and intensity.

Also on this handsomely engineered compact disc--Accord 149047, another Harmonia Mundi import--is the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (1937), dazzlingly presented by pianists Janka and Juerg Wyttenbach and percussionists Siegfried Schmid and Gerhard Huber.