Release Date: 12 January 2000
Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 4891030502611
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: BARTOK
Description
Bela Bartok (1881 - 1945)Concerto for Orchestra Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta The Hungarian composer Bela Bartok was born in 1881 in anarea that now forms part of Romania. His father, director of an agricultural college, wasa keen amateur musician, while it was from his mother that he received his early pianolessons. The death of his father in 1889 led to a less settled existence, as his motherresumed work as a teacher, eventually settling in the Slovak capital of Sratislava (theHungarian Pozsony), where Bartok passed his early adolescence, counting among hisschool-fellows the composer Erno Dohnanyi. Offered the chance of musical training inVienna, like Dohnanyi he chose instead Budapest, where he won a considerable reputation asa pianist, being appointed to the teaching staff of the Academy of Music in 1907. At thesame time he developed a deep interest, shared with his compatriot Zoltan Kodaly, in thefolk-music of his own and adjacent countries, later extended as far as Anatolia, where hecollaborated in research with the Turkish composer Adnan Sayg??n.As a composer Bartok found acceptance much more difficult,particularly in his own country, which was, in any case, beset by political troubles, whenthe brief post-war left-wing government of Bela Kun was replaced by the reactionaryregime of Admiral Horthy. Meanwhile his reputation abroad grew, particularly among thosewith an interest in contemporary music, and his success both as a pianist and as acomposer, coupled with dissatisfaction at the growing association between the Horthygovernment and National Socialist Germany, led him in 1940 to emigrate to the UnitedStates of America.In his last years, after briefly held teaching appointments atColumbia and Harvard, Bartok suffered from increasing ill-health, and from poverty whichthe conditions of exile in war-time could do nothing to alleviate. He died in straitenedcircumstances in 1945, leaving a new Viola Concerto incomplete and a Third Piano Concertomore nearly finished.The Concerto for Orchestra is among the composer's last works.It was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in 1943 in memory of thedistinguished conductor Sergey Koussevitzky's wife Nathalie and received its firstperformance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Koussevitzky in December 1944. The workdisplays the virtuoso talents of different sections of the orchestra, using devices oftextural and dynamic contrast, thus justifying its title.Bartok himself wrote of the gradual transition of the workfrom the severity of the first movement, to the third, with its song of death and to thefinale with its reassertion of life. The second movement varies this progress by treatingpairs of instruments in different harmonic intervals, a light-hearted interlude.Contrapuntal possibilities are explored in the first movement, while the third has the airof a folk-song, coupled with the mood of night-music that was part of the composer'smusical language. A fragment of the S
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Yang Zheng; Xinxin Song; ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra; Gottfried Rabl
Spectrum Concerts Berlin
Robert Trent
