Salonen Album Revisits Bartók Piano Concertos

courtesy of A440

One week from today Pentatone will release its first album of the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) under the baton of its Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen. The album is devoted entirely to the three piano concertos composed by Béla Bartók. The soloist is Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and all of the recordings were made in conjunction with SFS subscription programs. Two of the concertos were performed in June of 2022, the first concerto in A major and the third in E major. Aimard then returned to account for the second concerto in G major this past February.

It is worth noting that Salonen has had a fair amount of history with these concertos. They were already released on a Sony Classical CD that was included in the 61-CD box set, which accounted for all of Salonen’s recordings on that label. Those recordings were made in 1993 and 1994 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing with pianist Yefim Bronfman. That makes for a gap of a little less than three decades, during which my exposures to performances of Bartók’s music were pretty scarce, the most memorable possibly being when Pablo Heras-Casado visited the podium of SFS in October of 2018, performing the third concerto with Spanish pianist Javier Perianes.

I have to confess that, during that wide interval of time, I seldom gave much thought to Bartók. As a result, Aimard’s performances with Salonen amounted to a serious jolt to my memory; but it was definitely a refreshing one. I find it particularly interesting that each concerto is associated with a different decade. The first concerto was completed in 1926, the second in 1931, and the third in 1945.

The first concerto is the most aggressive; and it is somewhat of an interesting coincidence that 1926 was also the year in which Bartók’s score for the grotesquely violent ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” was first performed, having been rejected for several years for its sexual content. The second concerto emerged between the fourth string quartet (considered by many to be the most intense of the six) and the dark rhetoric of the “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.” The third concerto was one of his last completed works. Knowing that he was dying, he wrote it in the hope that his wife Ditta would benefit from the income of performing it.

Back in my student days during the Sixties, Bartók’s music, including the three piano concertos, maintained a high status in academic courses about twentieth-century music. By the time Salonen made his first round of recordings, that status had pretty much deteriorated. The fact that he has now recorded the concerto cycle for the second time suggests that he views it as a torch that still deserves to be carried. I definitely agree with him, just as I was strongly impressed by Aimard’s interpretations of the piano parts.

I was also impressed to see that there will still be a place for Bartók in this season’s repertoire. Salonen will conduct a performance of the one-act opera “Bluebeard’s Castle,” featuring mezzo Michelle DeYoung and baritone Gerald Finley, who will be performing in the Orchestral Series for the first time. Salonen clearly appreciates Bartók’s “dark side;” and I have already locked in my commitment for his first performance of this enigmatic opera on this coming March 1!