Concerto for Orchestra 
Béla Bartók  (1881-1945)

[1943]

Not long after he graduated from the Budapest Academy in 1903, Béla Bartók became obsessed with recording and cataloging folksongs in his native Hungary and beyond. His efforts made him one of the founding fathers in the field of ethnomusicology and helped him create some of the most original and attractive music of the 20th century.

Bartók’s career dreams came true in 1934 when he was able to stop teaching music and switch to a role at the Budapest Academy of Sciences, where he created a systematic catalog of his field recordings and transcriptions. This period also turned out to be fruitful for his own compositions, until the buildup to war made life impossible in Hungary and he had to leave for New York in 1940. His career and his health both deteriorated, and by 1943 he was hospitalized and unable to pay for his medical care.

Two friends and fellow Hungarians, violinist Josef Szigeti and conductor Fritz Reiner, intervened. They convinced Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a self-funded patron of new music, to visit Bartók’s hospital room with a commission for a new work (along with a substantial down payment). The offer buoyed Bartók, and soon he was at work on his Concerto for Orchestra, the first in a series of major works composed in his final years.

Rather than a concerto featuring an individual or small group of soloists, or a symphony that treats the orchestra as a singular unit, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra showcases all the musicians within a symphony orchestra. Bartók never wrote a true symphony, and it seems fitting that this master of chamber music made his most acclaimed orchestral statement in a format suited to the individual expression of each instrument.

The concerto’s Introduzione builds several themes from equidistant leaps of perfect fourths, as in the expanding statements of the lower strings. The second movement, Giuoco delle coppie (Game of the Pairs), features pairs of woodwinds each entering at different intervals.

The fourth movement is an intermezzo full of shifting rhythms, and the finale allows orchestral groups to flex their particular muscles, with passages for stentorian brass, scampering strings, nimble winds, and explosive percussion.

Piccolo, three flutes, three oboes, English horn, three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps, strings