On Friday evening I went to Carnegie Hall to hear an all-Bartók program at a concert given by the Budapest Festival Orchestra under the direction of its Music Director, Iván Fischer. This was a rare treat as I've always considered this ensemble the foremost interpreters of the great mondernist's music.
The program opened with the suite from The Miraculous Mandarim, Op 19 (1918-1924) that was for me the highlight of the entire concert. Most concert suites are arranged by their composers after the original works from which they derived had achieved success. Of this piece, the opposite was true. So brutal and horrific was the full ballet that it was banned in Germany after its premiere in Cologne, and Bartók found it highly difficult to find other venues that would agree to produce it. Not only was the plot, taken from a story by the composer's compatriot Melchior Lengyel, truly disturbing in recounting the tale of a victim lured to his death by a prostitute, but the accompanying music was itself appropriately dark and brutal. At the time of its first performances, it was compared to Stravinsky's "barbaric" ballet music for Le Sacre du printemps. For those seeking solace in classical music after having just experienced the horrors of World War I it was too much. Of course, it is exactly the sense of horror expressed so well by the music that makes it attractive to modern audiences. Filled with dissonance and making use of virtually every modernist technique Bartók could lay his hands on, this is really the soundtrack of a nightmare and, along with the equally dark Bluebeard's Castle, one of the composer's greatest achievements. It celebrates a world that has grown seriously out of joint and given over to mindless violence and in so doing explores the deepest recesses of the unconscious mind.
The next work featured the Cantemus Choir led by Chorus Master Dénes Szabó and consisted of selections from Twenty-Seven Two- and Three-Part Choruses, BB 111 (1935). As Maestro Fischer explained to the audience, Bartók was not only a composer but an educator as well and wrote these pieces for children's choir as a means of furthering young students' knowledge and appreciation of music. Six songs - "Suitor," "Courting," "Jeering," "Enchanting Song," "Regret," and "God be with you!" - were performed a cappella and seven - "Hussar," "Wandering," "Loafers’ Song," "Don’t leave here!," "Don’t leave me!," "Bread-baking" and "Boys’ Teasing Song" - with the accompaniment of a "children's orchestra" whose part was here taken on by members of the BFO itself. By the time he composed these songs Bartók, considered the world's first ethnomusicologist, had been studying and recording for decades the folk music of his native Hungary. Here he took texts from this traditional folk music (but did not hesitate to change the wording wherever he saw fit) while freely adapting them to his own original compositions. Though these compositions were of course also deeply influenced by folk music, they shared other sources as well. Most notable among these, surprisingly, was the Renaissance music of Palestrina, a master of polyphony. As a result, the songs possessed an antique flavor strongly reminiscent of centuries old ecclesiastical music.
The program closed with a performance of the Concerto for Orchestra, Sz. 116, BB 123 (1943). The work, originally commissioned by Koussevitzky at a time when the composer was ill and badly in need of financial assistance, was so titled because each section of the orchestra is called upon at one point or another to take the part of soloist. This is a colorful work that sums up many of Bartók's concerns as a composer - from the folk melodies in the second movement, to the use of "night music" in the third movement to the dance rhythms in the final movement. Despite the Concerto's complexity, the music is highly accessible to the point where this has become one of the composer's most popular works.
Friday evening's performance was the first of two devoted entirely to the music of Bartók whose accomplishments were so diverse that a single evening's performance would never have been able to do them justice. Certainly these works could not have received better or more loving treatment than they were given by this ensemble.
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