Dance Suite, BB 86

Program notes

About the Work

Bartók’s Dance Suite is one of his most accessible and joyful orchestral works, a six-movement celebration of folk music written for a grand civic occasion. In 1923 the Hungarian capital marked the fiftieth anniversary of the union of the three towns of Buda, Pest and Óbuda into a single city, Budapest, and the municipal authorities commissioned festive works from the country’s three leading composers: Ernő (Ernst von) Dohnányi, Zoltán Kodály and Bartók. The result was a memorable gala concert on 19 November 1923, at which Dohnányi conducted his Festival Overture, Kodály unveiled his great Psalmus Hungaricus, and Bartók contributed this Dance Suite. Of the three it was Bartók’s piece that travelled fastest and furthest, quickly establishing itself across Europe and becoming one of his most-performed scores.

By 1923 Bartók had spent nearly two decades as a pioneering collector of folk music, travelling with a wax-cylinder phonograph through the villages of Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and even North Africa, recording and transcribing thousands of peasant melodies. The Dance Suite distils that lifelong research, but in a special way: rather than quoting actual folk tunes, Bartók invented his own melodies in the spirit of the various traditions he had studied: Hungarian, Romanian, Arab and a kind of imaginary ‘universal’ peasant idiom. He described the work simply as ‘the result of my researches and love for folk music.’ The suite’s six short movements run together without a break, linked by a gentle, songful ritornello, a recurring ‘Hungarian’ refrain that returns between the dances and finally helps gather everything into a triumphant close.

The writing is vivid, earthy and superbly orchestrated, ranging from heavy, stamping dances to delicate, exotic woodwind arabesques. It is Bartók at his most outgoing and colourful (rhythmically driving, harmonically pungent, but always rooted in the dance) and makes a brilliant, high-energy opening to the concert.

What to Listen For

Listen for the way the six movements flow into one another as a continuous span, and for the gentle, lyrical ritornello, a relaxed, slightly nostalgic ‘Hungarian’ tune that keeps returning between the dances like a familiar face in a crowd. It is the thread that binds the whole suite together and brings it home at the end.

Within that frame, savour the contrast of the dances themselves: the heavy, lurching, almost primitive stamp of the opening; the swirling, exotic woodwind writing with its sinuous, ‘Arab’-flavoured arabesques and snapping percussion; quicker, scurrying folk-dance episodes; and a broad, warm slow section before the finale. Listen for Bartók’s brilliant orchestral colour (earthy low brass and bassoons, chattering clarinets, glinting percussion) and for the relentless rhythmic energy that drives the music. The suite gathers all its ideas into a jubilant final movement that recalls earlier themes and ends in a blaze: a concise, exhilarating tour of Bartók’s folk-inspired imagination.