IF memory serves me, I first heard a Béla Bartók composition in a recording of Contrasts, a work he wrote for Benny Goodman and Joseph Szigeti. Since then, I have heard a good deal of Bartók’s music, and I have no doubt that he challenged Stravinsky and left the sterilities of Arnold Schoenberg far behind. Bartók was a post-modernist romantic, seized by emotion and melody—as Stravinsky was a post-modernist classicist. These labels are, of course, meaningless. Of significance is what is on the score and what reaches the ear. So I would venture to say that a half-dozen decades from today, Béla Bartók will be a far more important part of our musical heritage than those whose elbows were sharper, while others of his contemporaries will be all but forgotten.
If you doubt it, I urge you to listen to Bartók’s Violin Concertos Nos. 1 & 2, as recorded by Isaac Stern and, respectively, Eugene Ormandy and Leonard Bernstein (Sony SMK 64502). The first was written in 1908, the second in 1938. It goes without saying that Stern is superb in tone, phrasing, and the other tangibles of great performance. But what is most interesting is that one concerto blends into the other as if they had been written in close sequence. Meanwhile, the Concerto for Orchestra, written two years before his death in 1945, demonstrates that there can be deep emotional and melodic content in the reaches of atonality (Philips 442783-2). This is a gripping, magnificent work, certainly Bartók’s greatest, and it is fully realized in its traversal by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony.
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