Summer 2014

Béla Bartók
24" x 16"
oil on canvas paper, 2014

Summer was not a good time to paint. Between reconstruction of the house, the World Cup, and the heat there simply wasn’t a space for painting. Now that the roof is done, the World Cup is over (heat still here), and teaching season starting, I found my way back into the studio. The soundtrack to all this summer activity? There wasn’t one. I didn’t buy any new music and I didn’t play any music while working construction. I remotely picked up an interest in the Brazilian composer Ary Barroso, whose Aquarela do Brasil was a bit of World Cup theme song, but not enough so to claim a spot in the top 100. The few records I did play in the past few months were classical discs by East European composers. Due to my habit of shopping for records at thrift stores, I have quite a collection of classical music. So much so that I stopped buying medieval music, Maria Callas recordings, and records from the Nonesuch label. What I still pick up are records by the composers Shostakovich, Scriabin, and Bartók. I now have fourteen 33rpm discs with the music of Béla Bartók, and two more records with ethnographic recordings made by him. Some records feature Bartók himself on piano. This is not the case however in a recording of The Miraculous Mandarin by Tibo Serly and the New Symphony Orchestra of London. Still, the record is pretty close to the source with the label being Bartók Records, and Tibo Serly being an intimate associate of Bartók. The recording was made in 1951, six years after the composer died, and was one of the first recordings of the piece.

Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók
12" x 12"
oil on masonite, 2012

Classical music has been a bit underrepresented in the Top 100 considering the vast amount of such records in my collection and the availability of cheap items. There are several genres, or topics that I collect within the broad field that is classical music. One of the topics that I always grab whenever I see one is that of the composer playing his (her's is a bit rare outside of contemporary classical music) own music. Recently I was delighted to find not one, but two records with the music of one of my all time favorite composers, Béla Bartók (1881-1945) at a local 2nd hand store. Bartók plays his own piano music on these. The two Bartók records, together with a third one, were neatly bound into an album by the previous owner. I love those personal touches added by music enthusiasts of yore. Bartók Plays Bartók is an album of short solo piano pieces, one is a piano adaption of a work written for strings, another is a piece for two pianos. The second piano is played by his wife Ditta Pasztóry Bartók. Ditta Bartók has even a more prominent presence on the second album, which is a performance of the piece Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. Béla Bartók is heard on piano, Ditta plays the second piano while Harry Baker and Edward Rubzan are the percussionists. The album is then completed with  some short piano solos performed by Béla Bartók. The past several Top 100 years have included many recordings made by Bartók in his occupation as ethnomusicologist, these were field recordings of traditional music made in Romania and Hungary in the 1930s and before. It has been more than 20 years since I've welcomed a Bartók as composer in the Top 100, from before the time I painted all the musicians. Here then is the first time I painted a portrait of Béla Bartók.