Concerto for Orchestra (Bartók)

The Concerto for Orchestra, Sz. 116, BB 123, is a five-movement musical work for orchestra composed by Béla Bartók in 1943. It is one of his best-known, most popular and most accessible works. The score is inscribed "15 August – 8 October 1943". It was premiered on December 1, 1944, in Symphony Hall, Boston, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. It was a great success and has been regularly performed since. It is perhaps the best-known of a number of pieces that have the apparently contradictory title Concerto for Orchestra. This is in contrast to the conventional concerto form, which features a solo instrument with orchestral accompaniment. Bartók said that he called the piece a concerto rather than a symphony because of the way each section of instruments is treated in a soloistic and virtuosic way.

Composition

The work was written in response to a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation (run by the conductor Serge Koussevitzky) following Bartók's move to the United States from his native Hungary, which he had fled because of World War II. It has been speculated that Bartók's previous work, the String Quartet No. 6 (1939), could well have been his last were it not for this commission, which sparked a small number of other compositions, including his Sonata for Solo Violin and Piano Concerto No. 3. Bartók revised the piece in February 1945, the biggest change coming in the last movement, where he wrote a longer ending. Both versions of the ending were published, and both versions are performed today.

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Concerto for Orchestra

Although a concerto is usually a piece of music for one or more solo instruments accompanied by a full orchestra, several composers have written works with the apparently contradictory title Concerto for Orchestra. This title is usually chosen to emphasise soloistic and virtuosic treatment of various individual instruments or sections in the orchestra, with emphasis on instruments changing during the piece.

For the distinction between the concerto for orchestra and the sinfonia concertante genres (or: forms). see sinfonia concertante.

The best known concerto for orchestra is the one by Béla Bartók (1943), although the title had been used several times before.

Goffredo Petrassi made the concerto for orchestra something of a speciality, writing eight of them since 1933. He finished the last one in 1972.

For symphony orchestra

This list is chronological.

Concerto for Strings in G major, RV 151, Concerto alla rustica, by Antonio Vivaldi (between the mid-1720s and 1730)

Concerto for Orchestra, Op. 38, by Paul Hindemith (1925)

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Concerto for Orchestra (Skrowaczewski)

The Concerto for Orchestra is an orchestral composition by the Polish-American composer Stanisław Skrowaczewski. Though originally composed in 1983 and premiered in the mid-1980s, Skrowaczewski later reworked the composition. It was first performed in its revised form on November 19, 1998 in Philadelphia by the orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music. The revised piece was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Composition

The Concerto for Orchestra has a duration of roughly 30 minutes is composed in two movements:

Adagio, Misterioso

Adagio, "Anton Bruckners Himmelfahrt" ("Bruckner's Heavenly Journey")

Reception

Martin Cotton of BBC Music Magazine lauded the composition, writing, "The Concerto for Orchestra is the expected display piece only in the first of its two movements, and the orchestra provides the necessary sparkle, but it also responds to the deeper substance of the long Adagio, subtitled 'Bruckner's Heavenly Journey'. Here the long-breathed string lines and cushioned brass writing pay tribute to the Austrian symphonist, while the harmonies and use of percussion place the music firmly in the 20th century."

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Concerto for Orchestra (Lutosławski)

Polish composer Witold Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra was written in the years 1950–54, on the initiative of the artistic director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, Witold Rowicki, to whom it is dedicated. It is written in three movements, lasts about 30 minutes, and constitutes the last stage and a crowning achievement of the folkloristic style in Lutosławski's work. That style, inspired by the music of the Kurpie region, went back in him to the pre-1939 years. Having written a series of small folkoristic pieces for various instruments and their combinations (piano, clarinet with piano, chamber ensemble, orchestra, human voice with orchestra), Lutosławski decided to use his experience of stylisation of Polish folklore in a bigger work. However, the Concerto for Orchestra differs from Lutosławski's earlier folkloristic pieces not only in that it is more extended, but also that what is retained from folklore is only melodic themes. The composer moulds them into a different reality, lending them new harmony, adding atonal counterpoints, turning them into neo-baroque forms.