ALAIN PLANES

Bartók: Piano Works

Dance Suite, BB 86, Sz. 77
Hungarian Peasant Songs for piano (15), BB 79, Sz. 71
Four Old Hungarian Songs
Piano Sonata, BB 88, Sz. 80
Romanian Folk Dances for piano, Sz. 56, BB 68
14 Bagatelles, BB 50, Sz. 38
Alain Planès (piano)
"At last, something genuinely new."

It was in these terms that Ferruccio Busoni greeted the publication in 1908 of the 14 Bagatelles, in which Béla Bartók conveyed the violent aesthetic impact of his discovery of authentic Hungarian peasant music. Over the next 20 years, up to the magisterial Sonata of 1926, he indefatigably refined an innovative pianistic language: pungent, dissonant, percussive, with multiple new playing techniques, that was to influence the entire 20th century. A master of every style, from Haydn to Boulez by way of Chopin and Chabrier, Alain Planès is revealed here as a Bartókian of the front rank.