This is a famous piece by the composer Béla Bartók. Bartók provided this summary of the piece:
“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… The title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat the single orchestral instruments in a concertant or soloistic manner. The ‘virtuoso’ treatment appears, for instance, in the fugato sections of the development of the first movement (brass instruments), or in the perpetuum mobile-like passage of the principal theme in the last movement (strings), and especially in the second movement, in which pairs of instruments consecutively appear with brilliant passages.”
Some History of the Piece
At the beginning of 1943, while Béla Bartók was being treated in a New York hospital, he was visited by Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony, who—at the behest of two of Bartók’s fellow Hungarian expatriates, violinist Joseph Szigeti and conductor Fritz Reiner—came with a commission for a work in memory of his recently deceased wife, Natalie Koussevitzky. Bartók accepted and produced the Concerto for Orchestra, his last completed work save for the Sonata for Solo Violin of 1944.
It was shortly after the meeting with Koussevitzky that leukemia, which was to prove fatal two years hence, was diagnosed; but the composer was kept in the dark. A wise decision, as it turned out, since during the subsequent months, he regained strength and, obviously, creativity.
The score was written in only two months at the health resort of Saranac Lake in upstate New York and completed on October 8, 1943. The first performance, an enormous success with audience and critics, was given by the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky on December 1, 1944.
The composer, in Boston for the premiere with his wife, Ditta Pásztory, reported: “We went there for the rehearsals and performances—after having obtained the grudgingly granted permission of my doctor for this trip…. The performance was excellent. Koussevitzky says it is the ‘best orchestra piece of the last 25 years’ (including the works of his idol, Shostakovich!).”
Béla Bartók
Béla Bartók was one of a handful of early 20th-century composers who recognised how indigenous folk music could fuel a new sort of progressive concert music. He was born in an area of Europe rich in peasant culture, but was soon set on a path of intense musical training in the classical tradition.
Bartók was initially taught the piano by his mother. The family moved to Pressburg (now Bratislava) and in 1899 their son enrolled at what is now the Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he would eventually replace its piano professor István Thoman.
By the 1910s, Bartók had become increasingly interested in collecting and transcribing folk tunes and dances from Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Yugoslavia and even Turkey and North Africa. He did so, with rare dedication, for decades. These melodies and rhythms lit the fire of inspiration within Bartók, who started to conceive music that fused their characteristic elements with the highly developed musical language of the day. His works managed to unite these two contrasting worlds with rare conviction and universality of feeling, in music of striking power and focus.
By the 1940s Bartók was a well-known figure, not least as a performing pianist. He left for America after Hungary aligned itself with Hitler during the Second World War. The composer struggled in the US, securing a professorship but few commissions or performing engagements, until he was thrown a creative lifeline by a fellow émigré. At the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conductor Serge Koussevitsky commissioned a string of Bartók’s late masterpieces including the signature Concerto for Orchestra. Bartók died in New York less than a month after the war had ended.
Fritz Reiner
Fritz Reiner was born into a mercantile family, although his mother was a keen amateur musician and he himself began to study the piano when he was six, soon showing signs of musical gifts and a highly retentive memory. At the age of ten, he became a pupil at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, where he was an active student, taking the solo part in piano concertos and playing percussion in the student orchestra. His teachers included Béla Bartók and Leo Weiner, who encouraged him to think of conducting as a future career. Despite his father’s preference for him to pursue law as a profession, Reiner became a répétiteur at the Budapest Comic Opera, making his conducting debut there when he was 19, with Bizet’s Carmen, in the time-honoured fashion of replacing a sick colleague. Later he said that this was ‘the hardest thing I ever did’. He was appointed as a staff conductor at the Ljubljana Opera House for the 1910–1911 season, where the first conductor was Václav Talich, and in 1911 he secured a position at the Népopera in Budapest, a large-scale private enterprise separate from the Royal Hungarian Opera, whose performances were aimed at a widely-based popular audience. Here Reiner initially conducted operetta and later grand opera, including the first performance of Wagner’s Parsifal in Europe following the expiry of its copyright at the end of 1913.
This helped to advance his reputation and in the summer of 1914 Reiner was invited to conduct at the Saxon Court Opera (the Semper Opera House in Dresden) on a trial basis, following the death of Ernst von Schuch. Immediately after his first performance, of Rigoletto, he was offered a contract for a permanent position, working alongside the theatre’s two other conductors and conducting symphony concerts as well as operas. At Dresden, he formed a close relationship with Richard Strauss, conducting the first performance of his opera Die Frau ohne Schatten after its Viennese première of 1919. Because of the city’s proximity to Berlin and Leipzig, he was also able to attend many performances conducted by Nikisch, whom he observed closely. However Reiner gradually became restless in Dresden, aspiring to, but not being offered, the post of chief conductor; and in November 1921 he resigned his position there. After conducting engagements in Italy and Spain he accepted without hesitation an offer from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to become its chief conductor, with effect from the start of the 1922–1923 season.
Reiner’s career in the USA, where he lived for the rest of his life (he took American citizenship in 1928), was based upon the long-term musical directorship of three major symphony orchestras: the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, from 1922 to 1931; the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, from 1938 to 1948; and last but certainly by no means least, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, from 1953 to 1963. In each instance he raised the playing standards of these orchestras to a very high level, and with the last two made a considerable number of commercial recordings. Between 1948 and 1953 he was on the conducting staff of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, where he led the first American performances of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. In addition to these permanent appointments, Reiner was active as a guest conductor and as a teacher. Between the two world wars he conducted opera in both Europe and South America; a recording of his Tristan und Isolde at Covent Garden in 1936 has been preserved, and he also appeared at the Vienna State Opera, conducting Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 1955. Between 1931 and 1941 he taught conducting as the head of the opera and orchestral departments at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where his pupils included Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss and Walter Hendl. At Curtis, Reiner encouraged his students to sing and conduct the recitatives from Mozart’s operas in order to develop a sense of vocal rhythm. In the autumn of 1959 he suffered a massive heart attack which forced him to cancel nearly all of his performances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during the 1959–1960 season. When he ultimately returned to the podium, he was noticeably thinner and weaker and had to conduct from a sitting position. No longer a well man, he stepped down as chief conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 1962–1963 season, to be succeeded by Jean Martinon.
Apart from his superb musicianship, Reiner was famous as a conductor for two things: his spare conducting style and his menacing temperament. He learnt the value of economical gestures from his idol Nikisch, and was reputed to have commented about his conducting style, ‘They say I have a small beat, but it is a good one.’ The purpose of these tiny gestures was to focus the attention of his orchestral players upon himself alone. He used a long baton, and would indicate the phrasing which he sought with small movements made within the overall delineation of the beat. His players were left in no doubt as to his intentions: he possessed a virtuoso stock of small but meaningful physical signals, such as puffing out his cheeks to indicate an entry for the wind players, and all the time he would be looking remorselessly at the individual members of the orchestra with the most penetrating gaze. The stories about his legendary temper are legion: one player commented that ‘…any day he failed to lose his temper was a day when he was too sick to conduct.’ At the same time he had a rather dark sense of humour. His biographer Philip Hart tells a story of the day of his first rehearsal as chief conductor with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: a violist introduced himself with the words ‘It’s a pleasure, Dr Reiner’, to which Reiner ominously replied, ‘We’ll see.’
The key characteristic of Reiner’s performances was their extraordinary level of technical accuracy, manifested in the precise observation of tempi, dynamics and phrasing. His preparation was exhaustive and complete, and the exacting standards that he held for himself were also applied to the musicians of the orchestras which he commanded. With his mastery of architectural structure and his precise sense of rhythm, Reiner was able to create performances that were expertly structured, superbly detailed, immaculately executed and, overall, performed with an appropriate sense of style. Although he made numerous recordings with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra during the 1940s, many of which exhibit these characteristics, their full manifestation on disc was only realised with the advent of RCA’s ‘Living Stereo’ engineering, which was used for his recordings with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The timing of his appointment to the Chicago post coincided exactly with RCA’s plans for the development of stereophonic sound, which involved the company recording this orchestra in stereo from 1954 onwards. Reiner’s insistence on intensive preparation, the virtuosity of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the superb sound achieved by RCA producers Richard Mohr and John Pfeiffer resulted in some of the finest commercial recordings of classical music ever made. Virtually all of these recordings can be recommended without hesitation, as can the more limited number of recordings for other labels and from live performances that have appeared commercially. Reiner’s achievement was aptly summed up by Harold Schoenberg, who wrote of him: ‘As a musical intellect, as an incomparable musician, as the possessor of an ear virtually unparalleled in his field, Fritz Reiner held a unique spot in twentieth-century musical life and thought.’