Concerto for Orchestra

Introduzione: Giuoco delle coppie: Elegia: Intermezzo interrotto: Finale

I have to admit to a strong case of special pleading as Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra has long been a cherished work for me, high on my list of Desert Island Discs. Coming from a Salvation Army background of hymns, marches and anodyne bowdlerisations of the masters ("Treasures from Tchaikovsky", arranged for brass band, comes to mind in which chunks of the master's music are unsympathetically stitched together) it was not until my early twenties that I attended a symphony concert. Although I revelled in the newly-discovered emotional outpourings of the great masters, there was a natural reluctance, perhaps a fear, to embrace anything that might be termed modern. The composer Patric Standford, much more adventurous than I, introduced me to Bartók, particularly the Concerto for Orchestra which we listened to over and over in our dingy Brixton student house. What an eye-opener after the nineteenth century angst-ridden romantic stuff! What a breath of fresh air! And, to jump forty or so years, what a treat to hear this wonderful music live in King's Lynn!

Béla Bartók, born in Budapest in 1881 to musically aware parents, was composing at the age of eight and had made a first concert appearance at the piano two years later. While studying at the Liszt Academy of Music, he was influenced by traditionalists such as Brahms and Dohnányi but, showing the alert mind which was to make his music so original, he was fascinated by works such as Richard Strauss's Zarathustra. There is no doubt that the young Bartók was taken seriously as a composer: his symphonic poem Kossuth was performed in Manchester in 1903 by which time he had already finished a Violin Sonata, a Piano Quintet and a Suite for Orchestra. It was in his early twenties that he discovered the folk music of his native Hungary which completely changed his musical perceptions. During this time he and Zoltan Kodály collaborated in a set of Hungarian folk songs published in 1906.

Many composers, like the Russian Nationalists, had used folk melodies to enrich standard musical forms, but Bartók set out on a more challenging path - to capture and convey the character and essence of an entire mode of music. But first, he had thoroughly to understand his subject. He spent years in the field with a primitive Edison cylinder machine, meticulously recording and transcribing thousands of songs. His goal was both scientific, in preserving and classifying folk material, and practical, in encouraging performance and appreciation in Hungary and elsewhere. From his experience, he came to believe that the most important music arose not from isolated cultures but from an intermingling of diverse influences.

In 1940 Europe was in turmoil and an American concert tour seemed to offer the chance of recognition overseas as both composer and pianist. Glimpses of better things in the New World and Hungary's alignment with the Nazis persuaded him to emigrate to the USA but the move was not the hoped for success. Dogged by ill-health and a luke-warm reception to his performing skills, he managed to secure an appointment as a musical research assistant at Columbia University; here he could pursue his passion for classifying, transcribing and editing folk-music. Bartók's spiritual and physical debilitation left little inclination for composing and it was at an exceedingly low ebb that he was admitted to hospital in 1943 weighing eighty-seven pounds. This might well have been the end except for the remarkable help of two compatriots, the violinist Josef Szigeti and the conductor Fritz Reiner. As a result of their influence, Serge Koussevitsky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, arrived at Bartók's bedside with a commission for a major work together with a vitally important substantial down payment. Bartók rallied in the most extraordinary fashion. Leaving hospital for an American Composers' retreat in New York State, he finished the Concerto for Orchestra in a few weeks. Given its première by the Boston Symphony under Koussevitsky on 1st December 1944, the Concerto for Orchestra was an immediate success. New commissions arrived and new projects were started but failing health overcame Bartók and he died of leukaemia in September 1945.

In The Life and Music of Bela Bartók, biographer Halsey Stevens provided a cogent analysis of the huge appeal of the Concerto for Orchestra. "It combines diverse elements from Bach fugues to Schoenberg atonality that had touched Bartók throughout his creative years, while all the melodies, harmonies and rhythms are coloured by the genuine ease of peasant music and unified by the power of Bartók's personality. Indeed, while the Concerto's elements are all-embracing, it isn't a dry intellectual compendium of influences but a wondrous, vibrant and spontaneous-sounding celebration of life, beginning with a primordial coalescing of consciousness and culminating in an explosive outburst of defiant vitality".

The five movements of the Concerto for Orchestra create an arch-like structure: the first movement presents most of the work's musical ideas; the central Elegia forms a substantial structural pillar; the Finale crowns the magnificent edifice. In between, rest two charmingly inventive and witty interludes. The piece opens with an extended slow introduction serving to lay the foundations of the music to follow. Hauntingly atmospheric, the orchestral texture is like gossamer, a fragile background illuminated by sudden touches of colour. We are led on to much more of an assertive theme, a whipping up of momentum, a sudden pause and then music which reveals clearly Bartók's intrinsic appeal of subtle unification of rhythmic and melodic ideas, astonishing kaleidoscopic switches of colour and intensity and clarity. The Giuoco delle coppie, Games of pairs, is altogether delightful. Set in motion by a martial side-drum, the coruscating romps of pairs of woodwinds and trumpets is briefly halted by a Bach Chorale-like melody tellingly scored for brass and horns. The side-drum is a constant reminder of the rhythmic structure of the music and the opening jaunt soon returns this time even more intriguingly orchestrated.

Bartók was so intrigued by the sounds of the night: winds sighing, leaves rustling, creatures scuttling, that his "Night Music" became something of a trade-mark. The third movement mixes elements of this with further development of music from the Concerto's introduction. The movement ends on a melancholic note leaving the last word to just the piccolo and timpani. As there are so many possible interruptions in the fourth movement, Bartók's title, Interrupted Intermezzo, is aptly chosen. The opening is immediately interrupted: the rhythm is interrupted, changing constantly between four and five quavers to the bar: the playful element of the music is interrupted by a lyrical string melody: the whole thing is interrupted by an extraordinary section in which Bartók lampoons Shostakovich's seventh symphony with music derived from the fairground. Order is restored and a graceful flute cadenza prefaces the end of the movement. The Finale is magnificently energetic; the strings have handfuls of perpetuum mobile notes, ever driving the music forward in an exhilarating frenzy. There is respite from the headlong rush with moments of great tenderness but the helter-skelter is soon resumed towards the magnificent ending.