Word: bartok
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...than $100,000 from the wealthy, 75-year-old conductor, to be used for commissioning original compositions. The library was also establishing a Serge Koussevitzky Foundation Music Collection, consisting of manuscripts of 35 works commissioned by Koussevitzky since 1942. Among them: Benjamin Britten's opera, Peter Grimes, Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, Darius Milhaud's Symphony No. 2, Aaron Copland's Symphony No. 3, Arnold Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw, Ode, by Igor Stravinsky, Marc Blitzstein's opera, Regina, which last week closed a Broadway run of 56 performances...
...writing the concerto, Hungarian Bela Bartok knew he was racing against death. Hating to waste one moment of time or one inch of score paper, the poverty-stricken composer wrote in a highly individualized musical shorthand, sometimes indicating whole passages with one or two pothooks, often squeezing in bars off the clef-at the edges and bottom of the sheet-without even indicating where they belonged. His most puzzling short cut was in the correction of notes: instead of erasing, Bartok grafted his improvement right onto the original...
After holding the confusing scraps of paper for two years after Bartok's death, his executor handed them over to Bartok's close friend and fellow composer Tibor Serly, who had earlier spent four months of skull-cracking labor trying to decipher the piece. Serly later said: "No man ever had such a task in his life . . . In order to finish this work as Bartok would have finished it, I had to put myself in a dead man's mind." Serly completed the score for viola (after rejecting the notion of adapting it for the more popular...
After the concert last week, William Primrose said: "There isn't anything missing in this concerto. It has everything-excitement, pathos, deep feeling and in places an almost folksong quality." Added Hungarian-born Conductor Dorati, who introduced Bartok's opera Bluebeard's Castle in Dallas last year: "I think of this work as a wonderful and beautiful white diamond. It is just as hard, just as crisp and just as white. I think it is an explanation of the whole man who was Bela Bartok...
...Minneapolis audience welcomed the piece wholeheartedly, from the poignantly elegiac first movement to the brilliant and stirring folk dance at the end. Wrote Tribune Critic Norman Houk: "The Bartok concerto was a major success ... It was given an alert, keyed-up performance by a soloist, orchestra and conductor who had been working on the complex score for a strenuous week . . . A permanent and important addition to the viola repertory...