Bach Bartók

Béla Bartók revered Bach, but in most respects their keyboard music could not be more different. In the wrong hands, Bach’s delicate, flowing lines would be blasted to smithereens by the Hungarian composer’s thorny, dissonant, percussive barrages, but the program crafted by Belgian pianist Julien Libeer — alternating Bach’s French Suite No. 5 and Partita No. 2 with Bartók’s Out of Doors and Suite for Piano, Op. 14 — is perfectly calibrated, finding surprising commonalities and talking points in their strange dialectic.