Bartok - Piano Concerto nr. 1

When one would have asked me at the outset of my Bartok traversal what works where most familiar to me, I would certainly have included the piano concertos. I was not a little surprised then to draw a blank on the First Concerto when I started to listen to these works a few days ago. Unlike the Second and Third Concertos, it sounded utterly new. And what a discovery this was! I had been wanting to listen to something punchy and energetic when zooming in on the concertos and what I got was an orchestral spectacular with the percussive energy of a Blitzkrieg bombing run. I listened five or six times in a row to this spectacular but complex work. Even with Janos Karpati's excellent essay (in the Bartok Companion) on the first two concertos in hand, it is difficult to figure out what is really going on in this music. That's simply because Bartok works with rhythm rather than melody as a foundational principle. And whatever there is in terms of melody appears in ultra-reduced thematic cells that morph and evaporate before you can aurally grasp them. The harmony too is exceptionally tightfisted. Only towards the end of the finale there is a brief flourish that brandishes something that could be considered as pathos. The real enigma is the slow movement which is hard to get a handle on. It grasps ahead at the terseness of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, but there is also something of the Mandarin there with that insistent, march-like, and very long (58 bars) ostinato on the piano, supporting a sequence of langorous and orientalising woodwind figurations.

In terms of performances I listened time and again to the Kocsis/Fischer reading on Philips, which seemed just about perfect in all respects. The phenomenal rhythmic drive is matched by the precision of the performance and the transparancy of the recording. The Anda/Fricsay is very good too - with Anda even more ferociously brutal than Kocsis - but I do miss the many orchestral felicities that are so obvious in the Philips recording. The version with Schiff and Fischer's BFO presents us with a more refined and lyrical choice, but I rather stay with the percussive primitivism of the Kocsis (or the Anda). Schiff's approach works much better in the Third Concerto to which I will return in the next couple of days.