Munich Philharmonic – Estrada / Frankfurt Radio Symphony

I. Introduzione. Andante non troppo – Allegro vivace

II. Presentando le coppie. Allegro scherzando

III. Elegia. Andante non troppo

IV. Intermezzo interrotto. Allegretto

V. Finale. Presto

Total time: 39:18

Instruments:

• 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon
• 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba
• timpani, snare drum
• 2 harps
• strings

(I first heard this when I was a college student, more than 50 years ago. I remember first hearing the last movement, which is just fun. It’s fast, exciting and sounds like movie music. The other movements were harder for me. I suppose I did not just start out loving the music. A lot of the sounds – the tonalities – were new and foreign to me. A couple months later I totally fell in love with the whole thing, and in more than 50 years that feeling has not change even a tiny bit.

There is a legendary recording of this with Reiner and the CSO (Chicago Symphony Orchestra), so choosing this much younger conductor was not a light choice. The obvious advantage is that you get to see everything, but this is a stunning performance in every way, so hats off to the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and the young conductor, Andrés Orozco-Estrada!)

1st movement:

The first movement supposedly is in traditional sonata form, but I have never studied the music. I can’t even give this piece a key because it so far beyond traditional writing. It starts in C# minor and ends in F major. Instead of thinking in form I just think in sections, and I know in my bones this is brilliant writing. Maybe someday I’ll do time stamps and break down what I hear.

2nd movement:

Presentando le coppie. Allegro scherzando: This is the other movement that is This starts in D minor ends on a D7 chord. You can’t end music on dominant 7 chord, ever, in traditional music, so you know something different is going on. “Presentando le coppie”, means “Presenting the couples”. “Game of pairs” in English is just plain wrong. This is series of duets by Bartok. If you watch carefully, you will see there are always two people playing together, thus “couples”. In this movement, pairs of bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes, and muted trumpets play together. It’s actually an incredibly valuable teaching tool for getting to know the instruments of the orchestra. However, there are also “triplets”, and this video makes it really easy to see. After a brass chorale, where more brass instruments play together in what sounds like a brass choir, each pair returns – this time with additional instruments playing together. This could be a “piece for young people”, like Britten’s”The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra”, and you can hear it HERE- it was written only two years earlier in 1945.

3rd movement:

What key this is in? He starts out with F#, C#, D#, A# – which could be Gb, Db, Eb, Ab -, then G D. And what comes next is so advanced, I have no idea what he did. It just sounds amazingly cool. Maybe someday I’ll get out a score and figure it out. This movement is dark in mood, and incredibly mysterious. The writing is so advanced that it could in a soundtrack for a movie that came out last month. It is incredibly Hungarian sounding, and it just sets an amazing mood. He ends on an A9 chord, which you normally would only hear in jazz.

4th movement:

He starts on an A7b9 chord, then does an incredible morph to F#7, resolving to B. That’s his key. That’s subtle, sneaky and pure genius. Then he goes to a 2nd folk-like melody in C minor, or with that tonal center, but it’s extremely modal. In the middle, however, the music is interrupted by a clarinet playing a trite popular melody in Eb major , with jeers from the trombones in B major. Then the beginning of the movement returns, making the whole essentially A B A. This movement is just funny if you have no formal knowledge of music. If you have formal knowledge, it’s so clever you marvel at the whole thing. How he gets back to B major at the end is just amazing.

5th movement:

It starts in F major and ends in F major. How did he get from B major to F major? Only Bartok could have done this. This is probably the movement you want to start with. It’s the first one I liked. The final movement to me sounds like pure film music, or at times something that would sound great in animation. It is partially swashbuckling music, but it retains the personal stamp of Bartok, so it does not quite sound like the music of any other composer. It continues to feature many solo instruments. What a finish!

Popular for 75 years:

The Concerto for Orchestra was first performed in 1944 and has been a favorite for concert-goers ever since. In general, Bartok has never become a very popular composer, but his Concerto for Orchestra is an exception.

The name:

Why did Bartok call this a “concerto”? Apparently he thought of this as being much like a concerto in the way it spotlights a single instrument, but the single instrumented being spotlighted continually changes. In fact, it is just “something” for orchestra in five movements instead of the standard four of most symphonies. He wrote this towards the end of his life, and perhaps he wanted to write something that would be more accepted by the average listener, or perhaps he had mellowed.

Always dissonant in parts, but late in life he had a greater balance:

He managed here to find a way to meld 20th century dissonance with the principles of music from the previous century. Extremists will say that he “sold out” by writing music that connects with more people who are not professional musicians, but I would argue that right now, in the 21st century, this music still sounds dramatically new. Broad sections seem as if they could fit into film scores composed in the last year.

Hungarian to the core:

Bartok came to write the music he composed is long and complicated, but essentially he moved from writing the kind of Hungarian music that was stereotypically accepted as Hungarian to music that truly was Hungarian. The older stereotypical Hungarian music was “fake” in the sense that it was simply an idea, created by outsiders, of what Hungarian music was should sound like. Bartok changed that by traveling all over his country and writing down the true folk songs of his country, and that “flavor” is in everything he wrote. When he did not use actual Hungarian folk songs, his own music had an honesty and realism that only a Hungarian composer could have who knew his own folk music intimately.

The first movement ends on what is usually called a “dominant 7 chord”:

This starts in D minor ends on a D7 chord. Today blues tunes almost always end on a dominant 7 chord. In fact, blues in major uses I7, IV7 and V7, and traditional teching does not even have a name for I7, which for traditionalists means Imaj7. (This is why I refuse to teach traditional theory.) But the point is that he was reinventing the kinds of things Debussy started with, but in a more radical and purely Hungarian way.

Movement two, “Presenting the couples”:

The 2nd movement is “Presentando le coppie”, which means “Presenting the couples”. For some reasons it is always called “Game of pairs” in English.

Movement three is an elegy:

An “elegy” is a lament for the dead. Who died? Only Bartok knows, and he took that information to the grave. It’s enough to say that this is not happy music. The idea of having one movement that is as serious as a heart attack goes all the way back to Mozart. By itself it could be very depressing, but in the whole it adds contrast. It adds a huge amount of dramatic impact.

Movement four, a swipe at Shostakovich:

The trite melody is an musical joke. He made fun of Shostakovich, whom Bartok believed to be overrated. I have never quite understood lack of respect among composers. Shostakovich was a fine composer, and some of his music was just as serious and dark as Bartok’s. There are other stories of composers making fun of other composers. Stravinsky did not like Rachmaninov or his music and dismissed Rachmaninov as “the six-foot scowl”, when in fact Rachmaninov had a wonderful, dry sense of humor around those who bothered to get to know him.

Movement five is a Hollywood film score, Bartok style:

It’s just as romantic and fun as the scores written for feature films in that era, but the music was and still is so advanced that it has not aged a day. In 2020 it just as amazing as it was 85 years ago. This is truly popular music, the most real sense.