Béla Bartók (1881-1945)
Concerto for Orchestra Sz.116
Viola Concerto Sz.120
Amihai Grosz (viola)
Orchestre National de Lille/Alexandre Bloch
rec. 2022, Auditorium du Nouveau Siècle, Lille
Reviewed as a digital download from a press preview
Alpha Classics 1013 [61]

One of the oddities of the life of Bartók is that, unhappily exiled in the United States, penniless and ailing with the leukaemia which would soon take his life, it was during this period that he wrote some of his most smiling, beatific music. Perhaps faced with mortality he achieved an equanimity that had previous eluded him, perhaps they merely represent an emotional response to the upturn in his fortunes following Koussevitsky’s commission of the Concerto for Orchestra. Who knows? Perhaps it was even his own largely overlooked faith with his last two works, the third piano concerto and the viola concerto having slowing movements marked adagio religioso. As is pointed out in the notes to this new release, the marking in the viola concerto is that of Bartók’s pupil Tibor Serly, who was tasked with completing the work after Bartók’s death and not the composer himself. Be that as it may the label is appropriate to the character of the movement.

Prior to hearing this new recording by Amihai Grosz, I would have tended to view the viola concerto as the exception to this mood of serenity. In most recordings – even very fine ones such as that by Kim Kashkashian on ECM – it comes across as a rather dour score. Not so with Grosz ably backed by the Orchestre National de Lille under Alexandre Bloch. What emerges from their hands is a much more playful and, more significantly, a more folk inspired work than we usually hear.

There has been a tendency for performances of Bartók’s music to divide between the modernist versus the folkie. Early recordings tended to emphasise the former. This makes the music much more severe than it needs to be. Setting aside the dedicatee William Primrose’s weirdly unidiomatic version, its lack of feel for the music made stranger by having Serly himself on the podium, even Menuhin’s noble account with Dorati sets out to give us an almost neurotically dark work. Since then most have tended to follow suit. I have often found myself wondering if the mood of the piece captured the collapse of Bartók’s hopes as it became clear his illness was terminal. Sadly, this theory makes no sense since the placid third piano concerto was written virtually concurrently.

With Grosz and Bloch, especially when juxtaposed with the Concerto for Orchestra, the viola concerto emerges as a stable mate for those other two late works. In the solo rhapsodising with which the piece opens, Grosz’s looser, more improvisatory manner contrasts for example with Menuhin’s more driven, purposefully manner. Amihai calls to mind some kind of country fiddler in some forgotten Hungarian, Bulgarian, Romanian or even Anatolian village. Bartók got about a bit on his song collecting travels! The mood is altogether gentler and more relaxed with Grosz making light of the work’s technical demands. The slow movement is rendered so warm and consoling as to merit the religioso description whether authentic or not. This is music making of deep, otherworldly spirituality. By softening the character of the first movement, the finale seems less of a jolly tacked on to two rather grim preceding movements. It also means that Grosz and Bloch are freed from having to serve up a remorseless, hard bitten perpetuum mobile and give us a final dose of Bartók’s beloved folk dances. The central section of this finale sees them relax completely and sing us merry songs round the May pole.

The same mood extends to the much better known Concerto for Orchestra. Even with this more popular piece, there has been a tendency to try and find in what is essentially a warm, witty score rather more of the character of the third or fourth string quartets than it actually contains. In both the Concerto for Orchestra and the Viola Concerto there are of course moments of great seriousness but not the unrelieved melancholy of the sixth quartet.

You will hear much louder, brassier climaxes to the first movement of the Concerto for Orchestra than this but not many that will so beautifully summon up the clamour of some country brass band. Latterly, the title of this work has been taken as an excuse for seeing it as a virtuoso showpiece. Yet like that other modernist classic, Le Sacre du Printemps, it is a work that has its roots deep in native soil. As with James Joyce, exile seemed to have helped Bartók to an easier relationship to those roots. Drive the finale of the Concerto for Orchestra too hard and you will dazzle the audience but the wit and affection lavished on his folk inspiration evaporates.

In the second and fourth movements, that amiable warmth is at its most alluring with the Lille woodwind purposefully not trying to achieve the blend and razor precision of the Chicago Symphony under Reiner. In the atmospheric introduction to the work, they leave spaces in the musical texture for the strangeness of Bartók’s inspiration to dwell like the dark shadows at the edge of an ancient forest. Alpha’s recording affords them an unusually deep aural picture within which to work Bartók’s magic.

It is, incidentally, this acuity of Bartók’s hearing when it came to scoring that is most missing from the viola concerto’s more functional scoring. Bartók’s music is there but as with Mahler 10 what we miss out on are the little touches of genius from a master orchestrator.

It is not often a recording makes me hear a work wholly differently and I owe immense gratitude to Grosz and Bloch for deepening my appreciation and love for a work – the viola concerto – which I only previously admired. That they also provide a different perspective on that piece by pairing it with a very fine account of the Concerto for Orchestra makes this a very lovable disc indeed. If you are looking for hardcore modernism best look elsewhere but for the warm heart of a composer too often unfairly seen as forbidding look no further.

David McDade

Previous review: Leslie Wright (November 2023)

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