Piano Concerto No. 1, Sz. 83

Program notes

About the Work

In the mid-1920s Béla Bartók was busier as a touring pianist than as a composer, and for almost three years he wrote very little. He broke that silence in 1926 with several piano works, the largest of which is the First Piano Concerto, composed between August and November that year. He wrote it to play himself, and he was the soloist at the first performance on 1 July 1927 in Frankfurt, at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting. The critics were outraged, and the concerto has kept a reputation as one of the hardest in the repertoire for soloist and orchestra to hold together.

Two influences meet in the score. A few years earlier Bartók had met the American composer Henry Cowell and heard his piano pieces built from tone clusters, handfuls of adjacent notes struck together. Bartók asked whether he might borrow the idea, Cowell agreed, and the First Concerto is where Bartók uses it most boldly. The other influence is Stravinsky, whose music Bartók had been studying: the concerto’s driving, irregular rhythms, with frequent changes of metre, owe something to that example. Under these influences sits Bartók’s own method. His publisher, Universal Edition, points out that the themes of all three movements grow from one small melodic core, and that short, folk-like modal lines are set against hard chromatic clusters, following a rule Bartók held at the time: the simpler the melody, the more unusual the accompaniment should be.

Above all, the piano is treated as a percussion instrument. The soloist hammers single notes and chords, and the orchestra’s drums answer. Bartók wrote into the score that the percussion, timpani included, must be placed directly next to the piano, behind it, so that soloist and drummers work as one group. Some printed scores left this instruction out; recent printings restore it.

Tonight the concerto stands between two Russian works. The LSO announced on 12 October 2026 that, for artistic reasons, it replaces Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, which was originally planned for these concerts. It keeps the evening’s taste for rhythm and orchestral colour, but its sound is harder and more percussive than anything else on the programme.

What to Listen For

I. Allegro moderato. The concerto starts in the dark: soft, low rumbling from timpani, piano and low brass. Out of it comes the idea that drives the whole movement, a single note hammered again and again by the piano. Octaves and syncopated orchestral chords build the Allegro from there. Listen for the piano and the drums trading short figures, as if finishing each other’s sentences, and for the cross-rhythms near the end, where the piano breaks loose before a final orchestral chord.

II. Andante. The strings do not play at all in this movement. The piano has only woodwinds, brass and percussion for company, and the colour is bare and nocturnal. It begins as a quiet conversation between piano and percussion. The winds come in one by one and climb, in a harsh march rhythm over a repeated figure in the piano, to a very dissonant climax, before the opening mood returns.

III. Allegro molto. The finale follows without a break, set off by drums and sliding trombones. It is a fast, stamping dance led by piano and percussion, with the brass cutting in. Listen for a middle section in which the piano keeps up a rhythmic ostinato while solo woodwinds join it, then a short, angry fugal passage, a brief dance-like moment, and an ending that stops dead at full speed.