5012 – Colinda

(Rumanian Christmas Carols. Set 1)

Bela Bartok (1881-1945)

Arranged by Roger Harvey

Difficulty: Medium

Price: £25.00

Programme notes:

Around the year 1915 Bartok spent much time researching folk music in Eastern Europe. Romania was a particularly fruitful area, yielding about 3500 melodies for his collaborative collection with Kodaly.

Amongst these were a number of Christmas songs and Bartok arranged 2 sets of ten for the piano under the title Colinde. They are not technically difficult and served as teaching material for piano students.

The songs were usually sung by groups of young men, sometimes by girls, wandering from house to house, Wassail-style, during the Christmas season.

The melodies have frequent irregular rhythmic patterns with the metre often varying from bar to bar. The set of 10 tunes follow each other without breaks.

This version of the first set was made for London Brass for a concert of Christmas music at The Royal Festival Hall in December 1986.

Performance notes:

Choose tempos that will give a shape to the set. The suggested metronome marks will achieve this.

Try to move from metre to metre with no obvious jolt in the rhythm; each melody should run smoothly from beginning to end despite changes in rhythmic pattern.

The last 2 numbers should gradually increase in speed to get to an exciting climax in the last few bars. Measure the rate of change carefully.