Customer Reviews

Bela Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra; 3 Village Scenes; Kossuth

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First - the quality of the recording. Bartok even more than most 20th century composers benefits from vividness and presence in the recorded sound. This 1997 production is wholly admirable in this respect, and all the way through each of the three items presented at that. This would have been wasted on indifferent playing, but no danger of anything of the kind. The Budapest Festival Orchestra strikes me as a superb ensemble, with solo instruments giving the fullest support to Bartok's claim to have written a `concerto' for them, and a brilliant blend of tone in all the countless ways in which composer calls for that.

In the first item there is a chorus as well. The Village Scenes (Wedding, Lullaby, Lads' Dance) are the composer's own arrangement of what had started as songs for solo voice and piano. The work is from the composer's maturity, written after the uncompromising Miraculous Mandarin, and it embodies a special combination of his interests by that stage. He had painstakingly collected and categorised folk-songs from the entire Balkan region, and these naturally form the basis of the pieces. The style in other respects is `modernistic' without being forbidding, and it is possible to detect some influence of Stravinsky, but that may be so or not. The combination of styles possesses a special attractiveness of its own, and these little pieces are much easier for a new listener to come to terms with than is the slightly forbidding Miraculous Mandarin. The production has not seen fit to give us the words, and I can't imagine why not. No doubt the general idea of each song is fairly obvious, but the texts are short and this seems a slightly pointless saving.

Next up is the Concerto for Orchestra itself, and the full effect of the recording is felt with the entrance of the full orchestra. The opening will give you at once the sense of what is to follow, with the tone awesomely impressive and the sense of perspective in the sound completely superb. So it goes on. The percussion sound at the start of the allegretto second movement is usually captured well, sometimes very well indeed, but I doubt I ever heard it sound as good as this. The brass tone in the Elegy is noble and affectingly beautiful, and the strings in the Intermezzo have a sumptuous depth to them. The finale barrels along at top speed, as of course it should, and the sheer distinctness of the busy violin writing is a pleasure to hear. This disc is a Gramophone magazine 'Critics' Choice', and no wonder. I just thought that the phrase quoted from the citation `...the players are being driven to the very limits of their abilities...' makes it all sound more effortful and strenuous than it seemed to me. I hear no sense of being driven at all. No doubt the orchestral parts are more demanding, even for today's players, than are those in, say, Messiah, but it is all handled not just with aplomb but with a near-contemptuous ease.

One thing that I hope will do a lot to commend this release is the early symphonic poem Kossuth. Lajus Kossuth made an abortive attempt in the mid-19th century to achieve independence for Hungary from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the theme represents Bartok's early patriotic sentiments before his outlook turned internationalist. In size, in the way it is put together and in style generally the work is strongly reminiscent of the contemporary works of Strauss. In musical worth it seems to me also that it can stand up in such company, and I would call it enormously superior to Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande. It is not a work one hears very often, for no good reason that I can think of, and Fischer and the Budapest Festival players do it proud.

One way and another this disc seems to me to have a great deal to commend it. Just as a performance, this seems to me a Concerto for Orchestra easily equal to Solti's (and not greatly different in approach), and it has a clear edge in recorded quality. The Village Scenes are fascinating, but the inclusion of Kossuth ought to be a marketing master-stroke. What this combination of works does is to pinpoint three distinct stages of a great composer's career right up to his deathbed. The liner-note is quite helpful in taking us through his life-story in outline, and in general I think this is the version of the much-performed Concerto for Orchestra that I would give my recommendation to, partly for itself, partly for what comes with it.

First of all, these are first-rate performances. Fischer's Concerto for Orchestra may well be the best recording currently in the catalogue. But what makes this recording stand out is that it offers such a complete picture of Bartok's artistic development, from nationalism through folk-oriented music to the style he found in the Concerto. Meanwhile, even in the Brahms/Straussian symphonic poem Kossuth (1904), you are frequently reminded of what was to come in later, more evidently Bartokian works, like the Concerto. It is a wonderful programmatic piece that has languished in obscurity for far too long.
Fischer's Budapest Festival Orchestra (nomen non est omen) effortlessly takes all the melodic turns of the Concerto without ever appearing rushed or succumbing to power play. If you haven't got a Bartok CD yet, make sure this is the first one.

As a complete program this is a one-of-a-kind CD that most lovers of Bartok will enthusiastically snap up. Although it is gorgeously recorded with wonderful detail and clarity, I'm not sure I would have bought this CD for Fischer's account o the Concerto for Orchestra alone, fresh and personable as it is. His Budapest Festival Orch. is colorful but not on the virtuosic level of the world's greatest. Fischer's reading works best in his fast, punchy account of the second movement 'Game of Pairs,' the twittering night birds of the third movement, and the vulgar nose-thumbing at Shostakovich in the fourth movement. Elsewhere I sometimes felt the absence of great musicians having a field day with Bartok's technical demands. Even so, I've never heard a reading that sounded so naturally exuberant.

But the fillers sell this CD. The Three Village Sketches for Female Chorus sound innocent enough, but they plunge us into a wild world--these shrieking village women are fist cousins to the ones in Stravinsky's Les Noces, with even stranger, more unsettling sounds. Bartok's orchestral writing takes a hint from his horrific ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin, in its brilliance and occasional shock value. Altogether, an 8-min. masterpiece.

Kossuth, a blustering patriotic tone poem based on the leader of a doomed 19th-century Hungarian uprising, will be a first for even experienced listeners. The earliest works of Sibelius and Stravinsky, two other modernists who ofund their footing after a period of derivative conventionality, pose the same challenge as this piece. On its own Kossuth is an earnest, somewhat faceless piece of post-Romanticism without the lush sophistication of Korngold or Zemlinsky. The best parts are the brash militant outbrusts which are a direct steal from Liszt. (I can't agree with the reviewer below who feels this is better music than Schoenberg's great Pelleas and Melisande). Kossuth is engaging enough to be worth more than one listen, but you wait for snatches of music that foretell the composer to come.

The best way to listen to this CD is straight through as a complete Bartok concert. In that framework, everything here becomes fascinating on its own as well as cmpared to what followed and what went before.

Ivan Fischer's splendid reading of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra is among the finest I have heard; only Solti's recording with the London Symphony Orchestra - which I have not yet heard - might be better. Indeed, I have seen this recording listed elsewhere as among this work's definitive readings. The Budapest Festival Orchestra plays with ample enthusiasm and warmth, without forsaking technical excellence. Philips' sound engineers have made a vibrant, well-balanced recording. If you have room for only one reading of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra in your collection, then this CD is it.

Bela Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra; 3 Village Scenes; Kossuth is a 1998 Philips Classics recording starring the SLUK Slovakianb Folk Ensemble Choir. Ivan Fischer leads the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Music notes have been written by Jurgen Hunkemöller. Great performance by SLUK and Fischer understands the pacing and spirit of Bartok's music. Highly recommended. 5/5.

Ivan Fischer's Bartok recordings with the Budapest Festival Orchestra do, in my view, stand among the great recordings of the 20th century. While there might, with respect to certain of the works covered, be equally good performances out there, I cannot think of any better ones. That said, I am not sure I would, ultimately, have preferred this recording coupling the Concerto for Orchestra with the early tone poem Kossuth to Blomstedt's identical coupling (but it isn't in any way inferior), were it not for the inclusion of a marvelous rendition of the Village Scenes.

But start with Kossuth. This is really a remarkable work, even if the style harks back to the tone poem tradition of the nineteenth century and contains little of the mature Bartok. Liszt's tone poems loom large, for instance (but Kossuth is superior to most of what Liszt contributed to the genre he arguably invented). It is a thoroughly enjoyable work, dramatic, vigorous, memorable, full of tunes and marvelous scoring and should really be much better known (even if it isn't, again, mature Bartok). Compared to Blomstedt's version, the latter is sleeker, more elegant and perhaps displaying more crucial forward momentum, but Fischer has the edge with respect to raw power, and the Budapest's solos are utterly marvelous.

The three Village scenes, dazzlingly orchestrated versions of music originally for voice and piano works also constitute an utterly attractive work, consisting of a boisterous, frolicsome `Wedding', a lyrical but rather dark `Lullaby' and an agitated `Lad's Dance'. It is hard to imagine a better performance than this one; the Slovak Folk Ensemble Chorus (ladies') gives a committed, almost over-the-top boisterous performance and Fischer drives the Budapest orchestra along in a manner that reeks of electricity - the combination is a truly red-blooded, magnificently vital and vigorous and really unmissable performance.

Competition is of course fiercer in the Concerto for Orchestra. And Ivan Fischer needs fear nothing. The vivid colors, the fragrance and taste of this performance is like nothing I've heard before. Everything here is so meticulously planned (I would think) and so marvelously executed that even a performance like Reiner's seems to be distanced. Marvelously characterized and alive, this is a thoroughly electrifying performance with scintillating playing from the orchestra, in particular (if any part can be singled out) in the buoyantly swirling finale. A real winner, then, and as with the other pieces the sound quality is mostly superb. If I have one minor nitpick, it must be the absence of texts and translations for the Village Scenes, but this disc is nevertheless a mandatory acquisition (as are the other Bartok releases from Fischer and this ensemble).