Suite No. 1
Concerto for Orchestra

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Thomas Dausgard

ONYX Classics 4210
Full Price

The Review

The two works here bookend Bartok’s composing life. The Suite was written in 1905, when he was twenty-four, and draws upon tunes that were popular songs of the time, rather than overtly nationalist folk material. Then a liberal humanistic Hungary was the dream – a dream snuffed out with brief interludes ever since. Bartok championed Hungary’s musical heritage but he despised its right wing politics, refusing a medal for this work when it was offered by fascist sympathisers in 1936. He revised the Suite in 1920 but Thomas Dausgard has gone back to the original version and this is the first time it has been recorded in that form.

The Concerto for Orchestra, by contrast, was written in exile in America in 1943 and was a welcome commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its conductor, Serge Koussevitzky. It was Bartok’s last completed work and here Dausgard chooses the revised edition from 1945, a few months before the composer’s death.

Both works are in five movements and one can reasonably ask why one is a suite and the other a concerto. The distance, in idiom and language, is immense though. The Suite is a sparky and optimistic canter through the fairly standard musical national themes of the day, as evinced by composers from Rimsky-Korsakov via Respighi to Suk. The Concerto is a much tauter affair, as carefully constructed as Bartok’s quartets, even if there are moments when snatches of tunes seem to appear and be thrown away with bewildering nonchalance.

It is requires virtuoso confidence from any orchestra, especially in the last movement when the speed threatens to up tip the ensemble at any moment. The orchestral sections are expected to negotiate the torrent of notes as if they were each Paganini and the conductor is more like a train driver trying to keep his careering wagons on the tracks without brakes. Dausgard and the BBC SSO have no difficulty with any of that. They combine precision with momentum without faltering.

Somehow, though, the recording feels a little flat, as if the energy (with the exception of that last Concerto movement) was marginally lacking, the commitment intellectual and technical rather than emotional. The intellectual detachment is partly inherent in Bartok’s idiom itself (as it was in Enescu and Martinu’s as well) but in these works it does not do to let the interest in the equations outweigh the force of the argument. These are admirable performances, perhaps not definitive.

SM