< World Premiere >

BÉLA BARTÓK : Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta

Thursday 21 January, 1937 – Basel, Switzerland

Basler Kammerorchester, cond. Paul Sacher

Universal Edition, 1937

"In the summer of 1936, the 55-year-old Béla Bartók, having by then achieved considerable international fame as a performer, composer, and ethnomusicologist, tackled a formidable array of compositional challenges in his 'Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta', a work of astonishing synthesis, organicism, and technical brilliance." — Christopher Gibbs