Volume 2 in Jeno Jandó's survey of Bartók's solo piano music offers an attractive cross-section of the Hungarian composer's most accessible, folk-influenced shorter works. Bartók's resourceful piano transcription of his 1923 orchestral Dance Suite opens the disc. Jandó invests each movement with idiomatic flair, whether in the Allegro molto's incisive, aggressive chordal jabs or the fourth movement's sensual lyricism. Similarly, the pianist admirably underlines the swaggering rhetoric of the Folk Dances and the Sonatina's three dance movements, albeit in a metrically steady, less speech-oriented manner than Zoltan Kocsis. This helps clarify the left-hand bagpipe "drone" effects in the Sonatina's first movement and the finale of the Petite Suite. And Jandó effortlessly taps into the whimsy and petulance that characterize the eight Improvisations. You might wish for a wider range of dynamics and tone color (the instrument, the engineering, or the pianist: who's to blame?), but that didn't impede my enjoyment of this disc. You'll like it too.

--Jed Distler