In 1940, Belá Bartók and his wife Ditta left Hungary for the last time and travelled to the USA. Although initially optimistic about the professional opportunities in their new home, Bartók soon discovered that almost the only work he was urged to accept was the one kind of work in which he had no interest: teaching composition at music colleges and universities, which he felt would imperil his own creative powers. He did undertake some concert tours and ethnomusicological research but felt increasingly depressed by the global situation and found it hard even to compose. By the spring of 1942, he was also clearly unwell, and suffered periods of ill-health over the next few years which eventually culminated in the leukaemia that would eventually kill him.
Nevertheless, new projects did eventually begin to appear: the Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned in 1943, and the violinists Tossy Spivakovsky and Yehudi Menuhin began to perform his pieces in high-profile concerts. Among several new commissions, he received a request from the Scottish-born violist William Primrose for a viola concerto. Primrose recalled that Bartók was initially ‘quite reluctant, because he felt he didn’t know enough about the possibilities of the viola as a solo instrument. I admired his integrity because at that time he sorely needed the money’. He encouraged Bartók to listen to an upcoming performance of the Walton Viola Concerto; and the composer also sought out the score of Berlioz’s Harold en Italie for study. This preparation clearly set his mind at rest, and he accepted Primrose’s commission, working on it during the summer of. He wrote to Primrose in early September to announce that the work was ready in draft, but warning that ‘it is conceived in a rather virtuoso style. Most probably some of the passages will prove to be uncomfortable or unplayable. These we will discuss later, according to your observations.’
Bartók was not overstating the case when he branded the Concerto highly virtuosic. The first movement is broadly lyrical in character, which often disguises the viola’s deft leaps and twirls as the music unfolds, the orchestra taking a backseat and presenting themes only after they have been introduced by the soloist. The second and third movements are considerably more compact: a sweetly consolatory ‘Adagio religioso’, followed by a cheerfully showy moto perpetuo folk-style finale.
And yet the piece as we hear it here is not entirely by Bartók. By late September 1945 the composer was very ill, working from his bed. When he died on 26 September, the Concerto was still in its unorchestrated draft, and was later completed by Bartók’s friend Tibor Serly. Serly freely admitted that this was a challenging task: the piece was written on unnumbered scraps of paper, with corrections written over earlier versions in a way that took considerable work to decipher. ‘What for Bartók would have been a matter of working out the details and scoring involved for another person a lengthy task that required infinite patience and painstaking labour,’ he recalled. It was finally premiered in 1949, with Primrose as the soloist, in Minneapolis.
Whilst the Viola Concerto belongs to the end of Bartók’s career, the First Violin Concerto is the work of a man in his mid-twenties – who was also hopelessly in love. The object of his affection was the virtuoso violinist Stefi Geyer, seven years his junior, with whom he became smitten in 1907. That summer, Bartók began writing a Concerto for her (although his surviving correspondence with Geyer suggests that although the discussed a wide variety of topics, she was not altogether taken with his views of the world and the romance was almost certainly doomed from the beginning). The piece makes extensive use of a four-note figure which Bartók described to Geyer as ‘your Leitmotiv’, and which begins the Concerto, the solo violin entering alone. It’s a dreamy first movement, the leitmotiv saturating the orchestral texture around the almost ever-present soloist: indeed, by the climax we are hearing Geyer’s motto in both its original and mirror forms, stacked through the ensemble. Bartók marks an ‘attacca’ into the following Allegro giocoso – a virtuoso tour de force that draws together ferocious solo passagework, the unmistakeable influences of Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner, early hints of Bartók’s mature folk-derived textures and rhythms, and passing memories of the mellifluous first movement.
Bartók completed his Concerto in early 1908, and his relationship with Geyer came to an end very soon afterwards. He presented her with a manuscript copy of his piece, inscribed ‘My Confession: For Stefi, from times still happy. Although it was only half happiness.’ Their brief relationship also inspired a clutch of chamber and piano works, including Bartók’s First String Quartet. The Concerto did not receive its premiere until 1958, years after Bartók’s death, though he incorporated much of the first movement into the first of his Two Portraits for violin and orchestra, which is entitled ‘One Ideal’.
Our programme is completed by one of Bartók’s best-loved works: his Six Romanian Folk Dances. These were completed in 1915 following an extensive song-collecting trip to Bihar County in Romania, and initially rendered as a simple piano transcription ‘as if for use in schools’. He subsequently provided a version for small orchestra in 1918, and the work has appeared in numerous other arrangements since.
The Romanian Dances are vivid miniatures; we are led through a succession of finely-characterised pieces – and the succession, and connection between each item is as significant and carefully-planned as the individual movements themselves. We are led from the proud formality of the opening dance to the scurrying Brâul; from here to the swaying quasi-Oriental melody of Pe loc, with its accompaniment of bare fifths; and via the impassioned, almost Romantic outpouring of Buciumeana to the two energetic dances with which the set concludes. The pieces were dedicated to Professor János Buşiţia, a teacher and polymath and a close friend of the composer, whom he accompanied on several major song-collecting tours.

© Katy Hamilton