Description

Bartók's Romanian Folk Dances, composed in 1915, are among his best-known works. They exist in multiple forms - in addition to several piano arrangements and an orchestral version created by Bartók himself, there are also arrangements by his contemporaries, made with his approval. Today, we can even access recordings of the dances performed by Bartók, which document his varied repeats and octave doublings, creating a "concert version" of the pieces. Bartók expert László Somfai has brought order to the rich collection of sources, incorporating significant variants directly into the musical text in Henle's Urtext edition.

This revised version improves the original in several ways:

It breaks up the long, complex original sentence into clearer, more concise statements.

It clarifies the different forms the Romanian Folk Dances exist in, separating the details about Bartók's own arrangements versus those by his contemporaries.

It provides more specificity about the nature of Bartók's own recordings, describing how they document his interpretive choices.

It streamlines the final statement about Somfai's work on the Urtext edition.