This is a recording
of a live performance at Chetham’s International
Summer School and Festival for Pianists
in Manchester on 29th August,
2004. Eva Kára is Hungarian,
a great-great-great-grand pupil of Liszt;
her interests however extend to 20th
Century music. On the evidence of this
disc she is a fine musician with an
accomplished technique. She plays first
one of the major piano works of her
compatriot Béla Bartók,
whose Suite begins moderately quickly
and in dance rhythm, a movement which
leads to a Scherzo, flirting (but very
rhythmically) with twelve note ideas,
then to a fierce Allegro Molto, reminiscent
of the Allegro Barbaro of some years
before. It ends with a relatively long,
very sustained movement of considerable
beauty, deeply felt in this reading.
It is tantalising that Bartók
composed another slow movement (lost
or perhaps destroyed), originally second
of the then five. Would this have made
the Suite better or less well balanced?
Ginastera was Argentinian,
whose music reached Europe around 1950.
This Sonata dates from 1952 and its
lively invention repays close study.
An Allegro Marcato, beautifully crisp
and clearly argued here, leads to a
scherzo-type movement which begins mysteriously
with an all-pervasive kind of five finger
exercise and a repeated note figure,
both strikingly developed. The slow
movement is chromatic and for the most
part sparse in texture; it has a good
advocate in Ms Kára’s poised
reading. In the finale the repeated
note figures and strongly marked rhythms
are back, and excitingly so.
This disc is of a live
performance but I am not aware of any
audience noise; the recording is fairly
close, the sound full-bodied and natural.
Though short (just under 30 minutes)
the disc is recommendable both as a
memento of a notable occasion and memorable
interpretations of two contrasting 20th
Century works.
Philip L. Scowcroft
Eva Kára, piano 
