His opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, is as psychologically penetrating and daring as anything by Schoenberg, but jump forward two decades to the mid-Twenties and the lushness has been purged away. The music is still intense but the intensity is channelled through angular lines, grinding dissonances, and a pitiless counterpoint as severely rational as Schoenberg’s so-called ‘12-note’ music. (Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph, 27 May 2015)

Ivan Hewett of The Telegraph has reviewed David Cooper’s biography of Béla Bartók.

Read the full review.