Readers may recall that, over the course of this week’s four performances in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony is presenting two different piano concertos by Béla Bartók. The first concerto was played on Thursday and Friday evenings. Last night the third concerto was played for the first time, and the second performance will take place this afternoon.
Bartók was still living in Europe when he composed the first concerto in 1926, which was given its first performance the following year in Frankfurt am Main. He died before he could complete the last seventeen measures of the third concerto in 1945. He had been living in New York in poor health and dire financial straits. He had hoped that the concerto would serve as an “insurance policy” for his pianist wife Ditta Pásztory-Bartók.
The second movement of the third concerto has the tempo Adagio religioso. At the time he worked on this movement, Bartók’s health had improved somewhat. As a result, he seems to have been influenced by the middle movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 132 string quartet in A minor.
Beethoven gave a title to that movement: “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart” (holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode). One of Bartók’s favorite devices involved stating a theme subject and then following it by the same sequence in inversion (rising intervals become falling ones and vice versa). With that as context, the attentive listener should be able to detect the inversion of the “Heiliger Dankgesang” theme in Bartók’s Adagio religioso movement. This movement is also punctuated by a generous share of bird calls, and Bartók lovers will probably encounter a few reflections on the concerto for orchestra that he had recently completed.
Regardless of Bartók’s health, both the first (Allegretto) and last (Allegro vivace) movements abound with optimism. Seventeen measures were left unfinished when he died. (His son Peter had already ruled out the bar lines on the manuscript paper.) Those measures were completed by Bartók’s friend and colleague Tibor Serly.
As was the case for the first concerto, the piano soloist last night was Pierre-Laurent Aimard. From a rhetorical point of few, he found just the right “sweet spot” to contrast the second movement with the outer movements. Indeed, there was so much positive energy that he and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen shared during the final movement that one could give little attention to the tragedy behind the writing of that movement.
As the program book observed, the performances of both concertos were being recorded for future album release. They will be joined by the second concerto, which is scheduled for performance during the next season. All three of the concertos have received comparably little attention recently, so the appearance of the album will be a welcome one.
While the rest of the program was the same as it had been this past Thursday, there were two significant changes in the performances. Luciano Berlo’s “Quattro versioni originali della ‘Ritirata notturna di Madrid,’” (four original versions from Luigi Boccherini's “Withdrawal by Night in Madrid”) begins with a call-and-response between two snare drums. On Thursday night the drummers played side-by-side. Last night they were separated across the left and right portions of the entire stage. That made for a more engaging sense of give-and-take between the two performers.
The buccina that inspired Respighi’s instrumentation for “The Pines of Rome” (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
The second change involved the two trumpets and four trombones playing the music scored for buccine (ancient Roman instruments) in the final section of Ottorino Respighi’s “The Pines of Rome.” On Thursday they were in the upper balcony; and given how loud things were on stage, they were barely audible. Last night they were transplanted behind the left Terrace seats. Seeing them greatly facilitated listening to their contributions!
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