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Written by Willem Boone
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Page 1 of 9 Utrecht, 1 October 2005
Willem Boone (WB): I was intrigued when I read in an earlier interview with you that you attended conferences of Bela BartokNoel Lee (NL): That was in 1943 at Harvard. I was 18 years old and waiting to be called up to the army. I finished my first year and he was doing a conference on Transalvanyan folk music. He was a fine man, very quiet, except when he played exemples at the piano. The chairman wanted to keep him at the Faculty, but Bartok was too proud. The plan was to finish the lectures in 1945. But he fell ill, although he composed some other masterworks like the sonata for violin solo and the concerto for orchestra.
WB: Did you ever hear him play as a pianist?NL: No, I didn’t, but he was an excellent pianist. In Budapest, he taught piano, not composition. I recorded his Rhapsody opus 1 and was the first pianist in France to record his Sonata, Out of Doors suite and Etudes in 1958. And I gave the first performance in France of his sonata for two pianos and percussion with an American pianist of Armenian descent, Luise Vosgerchian, who eventually became the chairman of Harvard Music Department. She was quite well known in Boston before she went to Paris. We even had a conductor, Karl Husa, simply because no one knew the work. It had never been played and no one could give us a clue about it. This is something they don’t do any more nowadays. Of course, now everyone knows the work and there are many recordings of it. One of the percussionists was Serge Baudo, who became a conductor.
WB: You played for Strawinsky...NL: Yes, that was in 1957 in Darlington in the UK. I did the concerto for two solo pianos with Paul Jacobs, Strawinsky was sitting in the audience.
After the concert, the director of the festival invited me to meet the composer afterwards.
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