by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
. Tonight: contemporary chamber music, choir, and orchestra
. Cleveland Orchestra news, and in the news
. Almanac: the circumstances behind Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra
HAPPENING TODAY:
This evening presents three varied options.
At 7:00 pm, No Exit heads to Praxis Fiber Gallery in Cleveland for a program that includes world premieres by David Glaser, Frank Wiley, and Max Friedman, as well as music by Henry Cowell. And there’s a special guest: pianist Shuai Wang (pictured), who will be featured in Cowell’s Tiger. Admission is free.
At 7:30, Jay White leads Quire Cleveland in the twelfth edition of the “Carols for Quire” programs, this one titled “Angels and Shepherds.” The free program takes place at Our Lady of Peace Church in Cleveland. Read a preview article by Mike Telin here.
And at that same hour, Vasily Petrenko will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in a concert that features Behzod Abduraimov in Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Also on the program: Edward Elgar’s Cockaigne (In London Town) and William Walton’s Symphony No. 1. Get tickets here.
Details as always in our Concert Listings.
CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA NEWS, AND IN THE NEWS
The Cleveland Orchestra has announced an addition to the 2023 Blossom Music Festival: a program titled “Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy.” Conductor Arnie Roth will lead the Blossom Festival Orchestra and Chorus in this celebration of the iconic soundtrack from that iconic video game series, which has featured composers such as Nobuo Uematsu, who curated this program. The concert also includes visual presentations from the series’ developers. Tickets are available here.
And among The New York Times’ “Best Classical Music Performances of 2022” is a program from the Orchestra: a performance of Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 from this past May. As the article reads, “The Clevelanders had, as usual, clarity, poise and adroit balance among the sections: elegance without reticence, urgency without pressure, airiness without weightlessness. But while descriptions of their precision and transparency sometimes make them seem cool, even chilly, this was poignant, humane music-making.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Birthdays on this date in music history fall more heavily on the side of pieces rather than people. Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 2 (1902), Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 (1935), Béla Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (1944), Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd (1951), and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide (1956) were all premiered on December 1.
We’ll train our focus today on the Bartók, which was first performed by the Boston Symphony and longtime music director Serge Koussevitzky, who was also behind the commission through the Koussevitzky Music Foundation.
One of a handful of works considered to be Bartók’s greatest, it is also perhaps his most popular. And it was held in high esteem from the start, although the composer did not live long enough to fully take in its legacy. He died of leukemia nine months after the premiere.
The success of the Concerto for Orchestra becomes even more meaningful when you take into account the situation of Bartók’s life at that time. Given the outbreak of World War II, the alliance between Germany and his native Hungary, and his anti-fascist views, Bartók fled to the U.S. in 1940, settling in New York City and becoming an American citizen not long before his death.
But he was not happy in America, his compositions little-known on these shores, and his health breaking down. It was while he was hospitalized (and not yet having received a diagnosis) when Koussevitzky came to visit him with the offer of the commission, which was to be in memory of the conductor’s late wife. Really it was a pair of Hungarian expatriates — violinist Joseph Szigeti and conductor Fritz Reiner — who were behind the idea.
Bartók accepted. After being sent by his doctor to Saranac Lake in upstate New York in July to recover from what was believed to be a recurrence of tuberculosis, he wrote the Concerto for Orchestra over the course of two months, completing it in October 1943.
Following the premiere at Symphony Hall in December of the following year, the composer wrote:
We went there for the rehearsals and performances — after having obtained the grudgingly granted permission of my doctor for this trip…. The performance was excellent. Koussevitzky says it is the ‘best orchestra piece of the last 25 years’ (including the works of his idol, Shostakovich!).
So, we end by expressing gratitude to the trio of Koussevitzky, Szigeti, and Reiner, for we may well have that commission to thank not only for the Concerto for Orchestra, but also for sparking inspiration for other late works such as the Sonata for Solo Violin and the Third Piano Concerto — all written in this otherwise dark period of the composer’s life.
Listen to a recording of the work from 1958 by Reiner and the Chicago Symphony here.