Is there another piece of music as gloriously, defiantly life affirming as Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra?
I’m often surprised, in fact, at what an emotional experience it can be. For behind its sheer musical genius lurks a powerful human story.
By turns sober, mysterious, playful, dazzling and spectacularly irreverent, it was the perfect finale for Friday night’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra program of three works by Hungarian composers. An early work by György Ligeti, the Romanian Concerto, was the concert’s lively opener, followed by Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with American pianist George Li. Spanish guest conductor Jaime Martín was in charge of this final program of the orchestra’s 2022-23 classical season.
Fleeing Nazi-occupied Hungary in 1940, Bartók settled into financial uncertainty in New York. Failing health was finally diagnosed as leukemia in 1943, and within two years he would be dead. In that short time, between some commissions and sheer determination, he composed the Concerto for Orchestra, his Sixth String Quartet and Third Piano Concerto, and sketched out a Viola Concerto that, like the final measures of the Third Piano Concerto, had to be completed by Bartók’s friend, the violinist, violist and composer Tibor Serly.
One senses shadows of ongoing war, as well as personal precariousness, opening the Concerto for Orchestra, and in its central “Elegia.” But the mood hardly stays somber. The second movement, “Game of Pairs,” gives cheeky little ideas to pairs of winds and muted trumpets.
In the fourth movement’s “Interrupted Intermezzo,” suggestions of bird calls and a romantic Hungarian folk song are disrupted by raucous razzings from trumpets and trombones. The finale mixes frenzied scurries, quasi chicken cluckings and virtuoso fugal writing. All this from a dying man celebrating life to it fullest.
Martín managed the frequent shifts in tempo, timbres and volumes with a sure hand. He was especially careful with nuances between forte and fortissimo, so that the real climaxes really registered as such. The orchestra gave him its all, with especially eloquent solos from oboist Erin Hannigan and clarinetist Gregory Raden.
Ligeti, who lived from 1923 to 2006, became known for dense avant-garde scores, but there’s nothing of the sort in the early Romanian Concerto. Dating from 1952, it sounds like an offshoot of Bartók, who similarly was inspired by Romanian and Hungarian folk songs and dances.
With its four-movement catalog of reflection, rowdy dances, bee buzzings and echo effects between an onstage horn and another in a rear balcony, it was perfect as the other bookend to the Bartók, and it, too, was smartly dispatched.
Li, who’s getting a lot of attention these days, performed the Liszt in a grandly romantic manner. He supplied all due brilliance and brawn, but also expansive warmth — as if improvising on the spot — in more reflective music. The slow movement was sheer magic. Martín and the orchestra collaborated with aplomb. The ravishing encore was Liszt’s arrangement of Schumann’s song “Widmung” (Dedication).
CORRECTION, 11:40 a.m., May 30, 2023: An earlier version of the subheading for this review incorrectly stated that Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 was on the program. It was Liszt’s First Piano Concerto.
Details
Repeats at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $35 to $144. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
