A Compelling Reading: Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra

Except among the cognoscenti, pop­ular acceptance of Bartok as a Great Master did not come until a few years after his death in 1945. It was the Con­certo that, as we say, turned me on, in­augurating in me a passionate Bartok Period, during which I listened often and compulsively to such things as the later quartets, the Music for Strings, Per­cussion, and Celesta, and the Out-of­-Doors Suite. Musicians of my acquaint­ance talked about Bartok, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg as though they were music's Holy Trinity. Today there are few musicians who deign to speak to me, but I somehow get the impression that, as an influence, Bartok has been re­moved from that lofty eminence.

Though there are perhaps a few reac­tionaries who still regard him as a bar­barian, Bartok has, it seems to me, been generally accepted by the concert-goer and record buyer. Schwann lists as many recordings (15) of the Concerto as it does of the Saint-Saens Third Sym­phony. Perhaps this sort of thing ac­counts for his demotion.

In Sunday's New York Times, William H. Gass reviews Home by Witold Ryb­czynski, a book subtitled "A Short His­tory of an Idea." To this last formulation Mr. Gass says "Poppycock! The thing is not about the idea of home but about comfort, a pervasive "bourgeois" affec­tation with which we have stifled our "awareness." (Mr. Gass sounds like Sav­onarola and presumably wears a hair shirt.) One of the indexes of our com­placency is that our "symphony soci­eties exist largely to insure that each sea­son the same dead horses will be ritually flogged." I find myself in the embarrass­ing position of loving a dead horse.

Bartok wrote the Concerto in 1943 on a commission from Serge Koussevitzky, who premiered it. The composer, exiled by the war, stone broke, and terminally ill, responded with a work whose orchestral brilliance and unaccustomed warmth made it something of a hit. There were those of his admirers however, who thought he was courting popularity for bread. His biographer Serge Moreux professes himself disin­clined to discuss the work. Having been swept off his feet by it, he repented the emotionality of his reaction and found the orchestration "inflated" and the style embarrassingly confused, the whole being tainted with echoes of Mil­haud and Hindemith. But, he con­cludes, the general public (read "bour­geois") allows superficial brilliance to muffle its awareness of these graver faults, and is likely to little note nor long remember what he says here.

Once again I find myself guilty of bourgeois taste, so be warned when I say that it was a real joy for me to en­counter the Concerto, which I've long neglected, again. It is not, of course, a concerto in the Vivaldian sense of creat­ing a contest between a soloist and the orchestra; rather, as Bartok himself ex­plained, the "solo" role is played at var­ious times by various of the the orches­tral groups. Nor is the five-movement structure orthodox, though Bartok in­augurated it 40 years earlier in his first orchestral suite. The recorded sound is stunning, and the reading is as compelling as any I've heard.