Ahmed Adnan Saygun, born in 1907 in the ancient Turkish city of Izmir, was something between a colleague and a protégé of Bartók, assisting the Hungarian composer in the collection of Turkish folk music. His career veered rather uneasily between Turkey and the West, however, and some of his orchestral music is firmly in the neo-classic camp, using Turkish materials as flavoring. The short piano pieces on this disc are closer to Bartók in style, and indeed they offer a model for a nationalist music that is not Romantic in ...
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Ahmed Adnan Saygun, born in 1907 in the ancient Turkish city of Izmir, was something between a colleague and a protégé of Bartók, assisting the Hungarian composer in the collection of Turkish folk music. His career veered rather uneasily between Turkey and the West, however, and some of his orchestral music is firmly in the neo-classic camp, using Turkish materials as flavoring. The short piano pieces on this disc are closer to Bartók in style, and indeed they offer a model for a nationalist music that is not Romantic in spirit. The sets of preludes and sketches on "Aksak" rhythms do not refer to a specific region; the word might be translated as "limping," and it indicates additive rhythms that alternate binary and ternary elements. All the music on the disc uses these rhythms, some of which Bartók guessed to be Bulgarian in origin, but the shorter pieces are the most rhythmically pungent. Modal and brisk without being really dissonant, they resemble the dance pieces in the last two books of Bartók's...
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