If you want to talk about a study in contrasts, how about Hungarian master Béla Bartók and America’s “King of Swing,” Benny Goodman?
Goodman’s musical training was classical (he took lessons at the local synagogue and with Chicago Symphony clarinetist Franz Schoepp). But he really caught fire when playing with dance bands. His early influences were New Orleans jazz clarinetists who worked in Chicago.
He shot to prominence during the Big Band era, but with the decline of swing, he decided to return to his formal studies, this time with English clarinetist Reginald Kell. Goodman developed a lot of bad habits in the intervening years, and he had to rebuild his technique basically from scratch.
Although a worldwide celebrity who had achieved enormous success, Goodman missed the classics and longed for a little mainstream respectability. Since he was by then in a position to do so, he took up performing and recording Mozart and Weber, and he commissioned or played new works by Copland, Bernstein, and Stravinsky, among others.
One of these was Béla Bartók, whose birthday it is today. Bartók composed “Contrasts” in 1938, on a Goodman commission. This trio for clarinet, violin, and piano is a raw, fascinating work, inspired by Hungarian and Romanian dance melodies. It contains passages of bitonality and frenzied scordatura (a deliberate mistuning, or alternate tuning, of the violin). Goodman recorded the work, with violinist Josef Szigeti and the composer at the piano.
Not your glass of pálinka? By way of “contrast,” check out Bartok’s ballet-pantomime “The Wooden Prince,” composed in 1914-17. Much less frequently performed than his subsequent succès de scandale, “The Miraculous Mandarin,” composed in 1918-24, this musical fairy tale for large orchestra bears the influences of Debussy and Strauss, and yes, Wagner too.
Never understood why it’s not heard more often. Just because it doesn’t have quite the bite of the composer’s mature masterworks doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYEijXHFY1w
From the King of Swing to “The Wooden Prince,” happy birthday, Béla Bartók!
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IMAGE: 1940 illustration of Goodman, Szigeti, and Bartók by Neale Osborne
