Notes researched & written by Joan Olsson
BELA BARTOK
1881 – 1945
CONCERTO FOR ORCHESTRA 1944
Bela Bartok was born in a small, rural town in Transylvania where Hungarian, Rumanian and Slavic elements merged. His father, director of an agricultural school, was a fine amateur musician; his mother was a piano teacher. The musically precocious youngster was composing at 9 and playing piano at public concerts before settling into studies at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. Here he acquired a reputation as a brilliant pianist, graduated with honors, and was appointed to the faculty as a professor of piano in 1907. The nationalistic movement throughout Europe encouraged Bartok and fellow composer Kodaly to answer the Hungarian call. They began frequent trips to the remotest parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With an Edison horn attached to a turntable of wax cylinders, they searched for, collected, analyzed, recorded, and ultimately published thousands of old Magyar folk melodies. A passionate interest and love of this music inspired both composers to incorporate elements of Magyar peasant music into their compositions. Specifically, Bartok’s compositional style was to become a synthesis of folk music, classicism and modernism, with a melodic outcome profoundly influenced by the folk music of Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria.
Bartok was outspoken, with anti-fascist, anti-Nazi political views, and was forced to emigrate to New York in 1940. Although known in America as a pianist, ethnomusicologist and teacher, he was neither recognized as a composer nor appreciated for his published works. Royalties, teaching, a research grant at Columbia, translation work, and piano concert tours provided a modest financial income. Health problems developed and affected his ability to earn a living. Then Serge Koussevitsky arrived from Boston with a commission to compose a Concerto for Orchestra. It was just the thing needed to rekindle Bartok’s desire to compose again. Death from leukemia occurred in 1945, only five years after settling in New York. Sadly, only ten people attended his funeral and his body was interred in a New York cemetery. However, in l988 the Hungarian government requested that his remains be transferred to Budapest for a state funeral and burial. Then the innovative musician finally received overdue recognition as one of the 20th century’s renowned composers.
Concerto for Orchestra
The title of this orchestral work is explained by its treating all instruments as soloists, using other orchestral groups as accompaniment. The work is probably Bartok’s most popular and is regarded as a challenging showcase for first-rate orchestras.
In the First Movement a spell of anticipation is laid down in the slow, quiet introduction. The listener hears a rush of thematic fragments suffused with melancholy and pessimism. The movement provides the dissonant side of Bartok’s music with its raging, pounding, pulsating phrases.
Second Movement: Known as the "Game of Pairs" this happy movement provides pairs of instruments their own thematic material. The procession of pairs is as follows: bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes and muted trumpets. Two harps also appear with their wild glissando (sliding) effects. This movement also provides a contrasting hymn-like section for soft brass.
Third Movement: Bartok described this movement as a ìlugubrious death song,î yet it also features a soft texture of rudimentary motifs, little arabesques of the flutes and clarinets against harp glissandos and trembling strings that reprise an earlier theme.
The Fourth Movement reveals a playful mood with a tender, folk-like main theme, while the Fifth Movement features a whirlwind of Hungarian dance rhythms in perpetual motion with a complicated fugal passage.