Charming microcosm
In his arrangement of Béla Bartók's comprehensive piano collection for guitar, Siegfried Steinkogler has remained as close as possible to the original. The versions are therefore demanding.
Should Béla Bartók's famous pedagogical piano literature also be played on the guitar? It is somehow obvious and yet not an easy undertaking. While the left and right hands interact on the piano keyboard but each have their own independent movements, the notes on the guitar are usually only played by four fingers of a single hand, the left hand. This requires a great deal of fine motor skills in order to bring out a groovy seven-eighth rhythm and the melody above it equally smoothly.
Now Siegfried Steinkögler has taken over the Microcosm Bartók's monumental collection of over 150 short pieces, 16 of which are arranged for solo guitar. They contain everything that makes up the quality of Bartók's teaching literature: pleasing, often folkloristic melodies, attractive rhythms, major/minor harmonies offset with sharp chromaticism, contrapuntal two-part writing. It is also always surprising how attractive parallel octaves can sound when used effectively in composition.
The Austrian guitarist, composer and editor remains as faithful to the original as possible. But what appears very simple in the piano notation looks terribly complicated in the guitar notation - and it is! Fingerings, position markings and string numbers clutter up the music, but help the guitarist to find her way around the fretboard. For example, an accompanying ostinato has to be fingered very differently in the course of a piece, depending on the position of the upper voice, and additional playing indications are useful here.
Back in 2017, Steinkogler had already published Bartók's collection For children but for two guitars instead of just one and with a different aim: to introduce Bartók's music to young players. With the Microcosm he takes a different approach: "With several conceivable guitaristic solutions, I have often dispensed with a simplified version in favor of a more sophisticated but detailed one," he writes in the preface. Bartók's miniatures are certainly worthy of the high demands placed on their execution.
Béla Bartók: Mikrokosmos, 16 pieces for guitar arranged by Siegfried Steinkogler, UE 38060, € 14.95, Universal Edition, Vienna
