Shenandoah: String Orchestra: Score

SKU: KN.08565S

SKU: HL.50600898

ISBN 9790080149331. 10.25x14.25x0.41 inches. Mate Bella.

The title of the piece refers to Lethe, one of the rivers of Hades, known from Greek mythology. The meaning of the world is 'oblivion'; the dead souls were drinking from it in order to forget about their earthly life, whose memories might have poisoned their eternal life. According to tradition, river Lethe also the symbol of time as a dynamically moving, flowing, changing entity. Mate Bella's composition follows this ancent symbolic structure, the flow of this mythical river and its waves in the acoustic space created by the music. The composer prescribes an unusual arrangement of the string orchestra, reminiscent of the polychoral technique of composition of the early Baroque, with larger and smaller groups of performers. To the right and left of the podium sit string quintets (two violins, a viola, a cello and a double bass), while the center is held by a larger string ensemble (eight violins, two violas and two cellos). The musical materials for the quintets are somewhat solistic, but the parts diverge and reunite repeatedly, while becoming shorter or eventually fading out into oblivion. The workings of these resemble the waves of a river, followed by ever smaller ripples and whirls of the surface.The piece was commissioned by the Musica Viva concert series of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. (Janos Malina).

SKU: BT.EMBZ6338

Béla Bartók composed his Piano Quintet while at grammar school in Pozsony (Pressburg, now Bratislava), and it still shows the influence of Brahms in its melody and harmony. The work was always resoundingly successful at his youthful concerts. When on 7 January 1921 the Waldbauer Quartet wanted to repeat the programme of a concert given ten years previously, Bartók was displeased that this early work of his should be performed once again. Finally he consented to the performance, and played the piano part himself. The quintet was greeted with tumults of applause, unlike the other pieces on the programme, which were written later. According to a communication by Márta Ziegler,Bartók threw away the score in anger, and for many years it was believed to have been destroyed. In 1963, the editor Denijs Dille received a package inside which were the score and parts, which had been thought lost. Denijs Dille wrote: 'In preparing the text of this edition for practical purposes, I used the autograph score, and Bartók's own handwritten parts for the first and second violins, viola, and cello. [...] Bartók made so many deletions and significant changes in the score that the resulting version was somewhat different from the original. In this edition we give the last version, supplemented with the minor changes and signs that can be found in the string parts.'.