Like so many composers, Béla Bartók started his music lessons on the piano with his mother as teacher. He composed dances before the age of ten and began performing in public soon after. Vienna was the place to study music, but Bartók shunned that tradition and instead chose to stay close to home and attended the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest. His preference was to study piano, but when he was introduced to the music of Richard Strauss, he was inspired and turned to composition. At this time, Hungary was experiencing a surge of nationalism and pride in its heritage and history. Many of Bartók’s early works are similar to those of Strauss but with a Hungarian tone. After graduation, Bartók collaborated with Zoltán Kodály and together they roamed the countryside of Hungary, gathering folk songs and dances from the smallest villages and taverns. The peasant music they collected was vastly different from the city versions of what they believed was the music of Hungary. Bartók took a phonograph on his travels and recorded the numerous folk tunes he heard and for this incredible collection of musical heritage, Bartók is known as the father of ethnomusicology. 

Bartók joined the faculty at the Academy of Music and taught for twenty-five years. As the Nazi invasion became imminent, Bartók and his family fled to the United States, and he continued to edit his vast folk collections as a research assistant at Columbia University in New York City. However, his health began to deteriorate, and doctors could not diagnose his condition. Leukemia was eventually identified; however, he was not informed until much later. His ignorance of his condition resulted in a flurry of writing which included the Concerto for Orchestra, one of his last works. 

It is technically not a concerto which is usually a work for a solo instrument and orchestra. But Bartók features each section of the orchestra in “soloistic” roles, hence the title. The five movements are palindromic; the middle movement elegy is immediately surrounded by two scherzos, with the first and last movements rather larger in length and scope. The first movement begins with a meandering introduction followed by broad imitative themes that reappear throughout the entire work. The second movement subtitled “Game of the Couples,” features different pairs of wind instruments playing their own dancelike themes, interspersed with a snare drum solo and a large brass chorale. The elegiac third movement is quite impressionistic. Bartok described this movement as “chainlike” where three themes are heard successively with material from the first movement introduction linking the themes together. 

The fourth movement appears to be a short snubbing of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. A stately melody is heard in the strings which is interrupted by the clarinet quoting the main theme from Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” symphony, but in a non-complimentary way. The trombones jump in with glissando slides that Bartók intended to make fun of Shostakovich, a composer Bartók felt was overrated. The exciting finale begins with a horn call, strings in constant quick motion, and Hungarian tunes tossed around between various instruments before the exhilarating conclusion. 

Notes by Kevin Lodge