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´óÏó´«Ã½ National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales
17 Oct 2024, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
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´óÏó´«Ã½ NOW 2024-25 Season Digital Concerts: Bartók

´óÏó´«Ã½ National Orchestra of Wales
Digital Concerts: Bartók
19:30 Thu 17 Oct 2024 ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
´óÏó´«Ã½ NOW and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero perform Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra.
´óÏó´«Ã½ NOW and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero perform Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra.

About This Event

1 Introduzione (Introduction)
2 Giuoco delle coppie (Game of Pairs)
3 Elegia (Elegy)
4 Intermezzo interrotto (Interrupted Intermezzo)
5 Finale

A colourful showpiece, and probably the most popular of Bartók’s orchestral works, the Concerto for Orchestra was composed in the USA, where Bartók and his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory, had moved in 1940 to escape fascism and war in their native Hungary. At this time, Bartók’s career, health and finances were in decline. His 60th birthday in 1941 had passed by unhonoured in his adopted home country.

While in hospital with suspected tuberculosis in May 1943, Bartók was visited by the conductor and patron Serge Koussevitzky, who offered him $1,000 for a new orchestral piece. Bartók wrote most of the work over two months while staying at a ‘cure cottage’ near Lake Saranac in upstate New York, shielded from the hubbub of New York City.

Bartók may have deliberately set out to avoid writing a ‘symphony’, regarding that as an outdated form and, while the concerto model had existed for more than two centuries, the idea of a concerto for orchestra was quite new. His aim was ‘to treat the single instruments or instrumental groups in a concertant or soloistic manner’. It is this that gives rise to a rich variety of orchestral textures. Bartók noted: ‘The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one.’

After the ‘Introduction’ comes the jesting ‘Game of Pairs’ in which, in the manner of Noah’s Ark, instruments enter two by two, playing at fixed intervals apart: bassoons in sixths, oboes in thirds, clarinets in sevenths, and so on. The central ‘death-song’ features elements of Bartók’s ‘night-music’ style: nocturnal, magical, occasionally disturbing. (It’s hard to believe Bernard Herrmann didn’t borrow elements of this for his Hitchcock film scores.) The uncharacteristically nostalgic, lyrical tune on violas in the fourth movement quotes a popular nationalistic song, ‘You are lovely, you are beautiful, Hungary’. A whooping call on horns opens the finale, a fizzing series of dances that show off the orchestra’s flair and virtuosity as individuals and as a collective.

Programme note © Edward Bhesania