Concerto for Orchestra, BB 123

Program notes

About the Work

The Concerto for Orchestra is the work that returned Bartók to composition after a silence of several years, and it has become the most widely played of all his orchestral scores. He had left Hungary for the United States in 1940, as the war closed in, and exile went badly. He was homesick, short of money and little performed, and his health was failing; the illness was later identified as leukaemia. Since the Sixth String Quartet of 1939 he had completed no major original work.

In 1943 the conductor Serge Koussevitzky came to see him in hospital in New York with a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation: an orchestral work in memory of the conductor’s wife, Natalie, who had died the previous year. The violinist Joseph Szigeti, a friend and fellow Hungarian, had been among those urging Koussevitzky to help. The effect on Bartók was remarkable. He wrote the whole score in under eight weeks, between 15 August and 8 October 1943.

Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance in Symphony Hall on 1 December 1944, and the piece was an immediate success, something Bartók had rarely enjoyed. He afterwards wrote a second, longer ending, the one usually played today. He died in New York in September 1945, less than a year after the premiere.

The title sounds like a contradiction, since a concerto normally has a soloist. Bartók’s point was that the orchestra’s own instruments and sections are treated as soloists in turn, and the piece was designed for an ensemble of virtuosos. In scale and seriousness it is really a symphony in five movements, arranged symmetrically around a slow central elegy, with a playful movement on either side and large, fast movements at the two ends.

Listeners who feared Bartók as a difficult modernist found this score surprisingly approachable. The mellowing was real, but he had not changed his language. The melodies still grow from the folk music of Hungary and its neighbours that he had spent decades collecting, the counterpoint is as tight as ever, and the central movement belongs to the eerie ‘night music’ he had been writing since the 1920s.

What to Listen For

Introduzione. A slow introduction rises from the cellos and basses in bare fourths, an interval that matters throughout the work, with shivering strings and flute above. The tempo quickens until the Allegro bursts out with a leaping, angular theme. A gentler idea for the oboe, rocking between two neighbouring notes, provides contrast, and in the middle the brass launch a blazing fugue.

Presentando le coppie (Presentation of the Couples). A side drum, snares off, taps out the rhythm that starts and ends this movement. The wind instruments then come forward two by two, each pair moving at its own fixed distance: bassoons in sixths, oboes in thirds, clarinets in sevenths, flutes in fifths and muted trumpets in seconds. A soft brass chorale forms the middle section, and then the pairs return with extra companions.

Elegia. The emotional centre of the work. Harp glissandos, rippling flute and clarinet and quiet timpani rolls create a nocturnal stillness, which is broken by an anguished outcry from the full orchestra, built on a theme from the first movement’s introduction. The calm returns only slowly, and the movement fades out with soft piping from the piccolo.

Intermezzo interrotto (Interrupted Intermezzo). An oboe plays a wistful, folk-like tune in constantly changing metre, and the violas answer with a broad, nostalgic melody. The interruption is a banal little march on the clarinet, a tune that recalls both a song from Lehár’s The Merry Widow and the ‘invasion’ theme of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. The orchestra greets it with raspberries from the trombones and shrieks of woodwind laughter before the noble viola melody comes back.

Finale. A horn call sets off a whirl of rushing strings, a perpetual motion that draws on the energy of folk dance. A trumpet tune becomes the subject of an elaborate fugue, and in the last pages that same subject returns in the full brass, broad and triumphant, while strings and woodwind race up and down around it.