Bartók - Concerto for Orchestra | Discovering Masterpieces of Classical Music

An informative and entertaining audio-visual concert at the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, Lisbon (2003) with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted and hosted by Pierre Boulez who analyzes the composer Béla Bartók's most famous works.

Béla Bartók - Concerto for Orchesta
4:04 I. Introduzione
8:58 II. Giucco delle cppie: Allegreto scherzando
13:44 III. Elegia: Andante, non troppo
18:17 IV. Intermezzo interrotto - Allegrtto
22:35 V. Finale: Pesante - Presto

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"They were the happiest days of my life," Béla Bartök described the period when he had travelled the length and breadth of his native Hungary, studying its folk music and recording the songs that old peasant women, goatherds and musicians in stifling inns and on village squares sang and played and danced for him, melodies that their grandfathers and great-grandmothers had sung before them. It was a journey into the past. By no means, all artists in the early years of the 20th century felt drawn to the seething atmosphere of the big cities.

Many turned their backs on modern civilization and fled to the coast, to islands and to the South Pacific or else they founded rural communities with like-minded drop-outs. Béla Bartók left the cities in order to discover an archaic, unspoilt type of music still rooted in the soil in remote settlements and forgotten villages. Here he found unadulterated folk music, or "peasant music", as he himself called it. Its free metres, rhythmic power, the elemental beauty of its melodies and the viability of its ancient modes struck him as "the ideal starting point for a musical rebirth". The songs and dances that he notated in the course of his travels through Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, the Ukraine, Turkey and as far afield as North Africa soon became second nature to him, an acquired mother tongue that provided his own music with an inner point of reference. This music had nothing in common with 19th-century exoticism or with operetta melodies and salon pieces all ungherese or alla zingarese, and so it was bound to produce the effect of a culture shock on unprepared audiences in the country's towns and cities. Trail-blazing successes alternated with tremendous scandals in the life of this prophet and pioneer of new Hungarian music.

In Hungary itself, nationalistic circles in particular soon had the ostensibly "anti-patriotic" Bartók in their firing line, accusing him of questioning the comforting Romantic clichés of Magyar music. In 1938, following Nazi Germany's annexation of Austria, Bartók began to think seriously about emigrating, so depressed was he at the thought of "the imminent danger that Hungary will surrender to this regime of thieves and murderers. The only question is —when and how? And how I can then go on living in such a country or—which means the same thing —working, I simply cannot conceive. As a matter of fact, I would feel it my duty to emigrate, as long as that were possible." In the autumn of 1940 Bartäk finally put his plans into action and together with his wife travelled to the United States and voluntary exile. But the frenzied pace of life in a big city like New York drove him to utter distraction. Psychologically scarred and with his health in ruins, Bartök must have been particularly shocked by life in a gigantic metropolis which, remote from nature, seemed positively life-threatening. A fatal illness - leukaemia - soon began to reveal its symptoms in the form of periodic attacks of fever and exhaustion. It was during a period of remission, when he regained some of his former strength, that Bartök was able to respond to a welcome commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and write his Concerto for Orchestra, which was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 1 December 1944. Only a few months later, on 26 September 1945, the sixty-four-year-old Hungarian immigrant died in New York's West Side Hospital. In good times and bad, Béla Bartók had fundamentally changed the face of European music with his epoch-making scores, including a single opera, Duke Bluebeard's Castle, his "pantomime" The Miraculous Mandarin, his string quartets and an encyclopaedic series of piano pieces for children, advanced players and virtuosos. Bartók has long been numbered among the forefront of modern classical composers.