Béla Bartók

The culmination of Béla Bartók's so-called "piano year," 1926, was his Piano Concerto No. 1, which he premiered in Frankfurt, in July 1927, with Furtwängler conducting. The work was at best cautiously received; at worst, it met with incomprehension and derision, especially in the United States. Bartók had spent the summer of 1926 reworking his entire approach to composition, abandoning the traditional concept of theme. Instead, he sought to attain a more basic level of expression, working with motifs or note-cells, with narrow range and simple rhythmic impulses. As he demonstrated in this concerto, however, the reduction was accomplished in order to bring about a new type of elaboration that was both independent of the post-Romantic compositional procedures of the recent past and fully participant in the modern spirit of musical innovation. This composition's close relation to the other major piano works of 1926, exemplified by the Out of Doors piano suite, is immediately evident in the first movement's repeated hammering notes in the lowest register of the piano. Percussion immediately comes to the fore in these introductory bars, where it collaborates with the piano (underscoring Bartók's recent thoughts on the percussive nature of the instrument), while horns blast a fortissimo theme so primitive that it seems less than a theme. Indeed, it is one of two note-cells from which the entire work grows with ever-greater elaboration. The driving pulse is unceasing throughout, while the themes themselves, augmented and extended through variation-style technique, remain somewhat neutral in their emotional cast. Bartók employs a range of piano effects including glissandi that are not anchored in any tonality, as well as whole-tone scales and tight clusters based on the interval of the minor second (sometimes spaced over an octave). The strings are used sparingly, mostly for textural variety, playing in unison (occasionally in canon), with most of the harmonic work done by the winds. A ritornello of polyphonic fanfares in brass and winds is particularly striking, and its final appearance triggers the brief and uncompromising coda. The strings are silent during the second movement, which is scored for piano, winds, and percussion alone. The ever-present primitive rhythmic pulse is halved here, with piano and percussion opening the movement in stark harmonic black and white. Winds doubled at the octave state a gloomy theme in canon, which expands organically and is answered by the piano in sharp dissonance. Midway through the Andante, the piano slips into a dissonant ostinato in slow 3/8 (soft percussion accompanying), while the winds slowly weave a fine texture based on the main theme. The episode expands and fades, with percussion having the last, nearly inaudible, word. The frenzied finale is launched by loud percussion, picking up almost attacca from the slow pulse of the preceding movement. Here, the strings join the pulse with a fast, primitive-sounding ostinato (open fifths) over which the martellato theme is pounded out by the piano. The percussive character of the movement, exemplified by a short, insolent trumpet solo, may indicate Bartók's awareness of some of the jazz-influenced works of the 1920s; however, the movement is essentially a wild Hungarian dance. The brass fanfares return, with "night music" (reminiscent of the "Musiques nocturnes," the Out of Doors piano suite), glissandi played by flutes and piano, and the concerto rushes to a spirited conclusion.