• 2 CDs with over 2½ hours of music
• Illuminating essay by Stephen Johnson
• Illustrated with photographs

Well over half a century after his death, Béla Bartók is held up as one of the twentieth century’s great musical modernists, routinely coupled with revolutionaries like Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern and Varèse. But Bartók’s was a very different kind of journey. In some ways he was also a great conservationist, collecting and cataloguing his country’s folksongs, and looking for new ideas in the sounds of nature. Bartók was not a creator of systems, never an iconoclast; rather he sought ways forward by turning music back to its primal, natural roots before the forces of urbanisation and mechanisation cut them off completely. His message is therefore as relevant today as it has ever been.