 C’est au piano que Bartók (1881-1945), âgé de neuf ans, fait ses premières expériences de concertiste et de compositeur – sa mère l’a initié à l’instrument trois ans plus tôt, en amont des leçons suivies avec le fils de Ferenc Erkel, père de l’opéra national, puis avec István Thomán, ancien élève de Liszt. Il est donc naturel que les pages pianistiques abondent à son catalogue, qui plus est celles à but pédagogique, tel le fameux recueil Mikrokosmos. Globalement, Francesco Pasqualotto remonte le temps pour jouer Quatorze Bagatelles, Dix pièces faciles (1908), Quatre Nénies (1910), la Suite op.14 (1916) et En plein air (1926), percussive à souhait. Les plus anciennes témoignent de l’influence de Debussy et de sources populaires, comme ces Nénies, en particulier, chants funèbres de l’Antiquité qui arborent ici des éléments de chants hongrois mais aussi roumains. Leur calme contraste agréablement avec d’autres opus plus brillants de l’album. La Suite montre Bartók rétif à l’ornement romantique tardif, moins proche de Schoenberg que de Stravinski. Avec talent, notre pianiste sert au mieux l’énergie et le dépouillement qui alternent à son programme. (Laurent Bergnach) Given the many facets of his work, perhaps it is not too much to say that Bartók’s tormented work represents the keystone of the entire twentieth century. His fi rst piano works of some importance are strongly infl uenced by Lisztian writing (for example the Rhapsody op.1) and language, but already the 14 Bagatellas (1908) have a more dry writing. These are songs, greeted with enthusiasm by Busoni, which present a very heterogeneous language, both for technical complexity (the former, for simplicity, would even seem to be designed as songs for beginners, while n ° 10 and n ° 14 are decidedly more diffi cult ), both as a language. The Ten Easy Pieces were composed in the same year and somehow deepen the theme of “beginner songs” already present in the Bagatelle. The piece opens with a mysterious musical dedication, supernumerary compared to the ten pieces, in which we hear, clear and clear, again the theme-motto Stefi Geyer. The fi rst pieces are extremely simple, yet they always have a color, an expression, a language of such interest as to make them absolutely eff ective even as concert pieces. As in the Bagatelle op. 14, a characteristic sign is the variety of language. There are passages with a clear popular fl avor (n ° 1, 2, 3, the splendid 5 that Bartók recorded several times, the 6 and 8). Others have a more experimental language. Shortly afterwards the 4 Diriges op. 9 ° (1910), unfortunately and incomprehensibly of rare execution. The infl uence of C. Debussy is immediately felt in the fi rst one, whose music had thrilled the Hungarian composer at that time.
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