Piano Concerto 3 - Bartok (1881-1945)

Allegretto: Adagio religioso: Allegro vivace

The Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, born in Sinnicolau Mare in 1881, showed his musical gifts from a very early age. After careful nurturing from his amateur pianist mother, Bartok aged thirteen moved with his family to Bratislava giving the opportunity for further piano study and early forays into composing. Four years later, accepted for entrance to the Vienna Conservatoire, he elected to follow in the footsteps of fellow Hungarian composer, Dohnanyi, preferring to study at the Budapest Academy. As well as his early interest in the music of Wagner and Richard Strauss, he teamed up with Zoltan Kodaly to embark on a lifetime's task of collating, transcribing and assimilating into his own work, the folk-music of his native land. In 1940, Bartók and his wife left war-torn Europe to live in New York. They gave concerts but, in spite of some success and a research grant to work on a collection of Yugoslav folksongs, finances were precarious and Bartok's health declined.

He finished all but seventeen bars of the Third Piano Concerto in 1945, the year of his death. Completed by his friend Tibor Serly, performance details were added by Eugene Ormandy, conducter of the first performance, Louis Kentner and Erwin Stein. An immediate success, this delightful piece of music has become a staple of the concerto pianist's repertoire throughout the world.

The Third Piano Concerto brings together elements of folk influence and the mainstream classical tradition in three contrasted and intriguing movements. The first movement opens with a beautifully relaxed and rhapsodic melody accompanied by gentle murmurings from the inner strings. From this delightful opening, Bartok's conjures music, at times powerful at times playful, seamlessly progressing towards the whimsical ending. The serenity of the slow movement is most telling. Marked "Adagio Religioso", the hushed atmosphere first created by the strings is sustained by the simple chords of the solo piano. A central episode is typical of Bartok's recurring theme of "night music", scurrying interjections from solo wind instruments, xylophone and the piano itself engender a fantastic picture before returning to a calmer mood. In energetic contrast, the third movement is off in a headstrong rush, brilliantly bouncing bouyant rhythmic and melodic ideas between orchestra and piano.

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