Bartók: Violin Concertos Nos. 1 & 2 - Renaud Capuçon, François-Xavier Roth, London Symphony Orchestra
Renaud Capuçon expands his wide-ranging concerto discography with Bartók's two violin concertos. Composed almost three decades apart, they are highly contrasted, inhabiting very different emotional and musical worlds. Partnering Capuçon is the London Symphony Orchestra under its Principal Guest Conductor, François-Xavier Roth.
Read more…Bartók's two violin concertos come from the opposite ends of his career, and both occupy key positions in his extensive and complex output. The first was written in 1907-8, at about the time the composer became a professor of piano at the Budapest Academy, and was for many years hidden from public view. The main influences on him during this period were the music of Richard Strauss and Debussy, which he discovered while on a visit to Paris in 1905, and his meeting with Zoltán Kodály, which led to a long-lasting collaboration during which the two composers embarked on a study of folk music. In his writings, Bartók noted how the issue of nationalism (which shook Hungary at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries) had left its mark on him and had prompted him to embark on a study of Hungarian music.
However, folk music was not his only source of inspiration. The whole of the Violin Concerto No.1, which remained unpublished until 1958, bears the mark of Bartók's infatuation with the young violinist Stefi Geyer (1888–1956), whom he had met at the Budapest Academy and with whom he had immediately become besotted. The concerto can be seen as tracing the course of this sadly unrequited passion. It is generally believed that Bartók conceived the work as an idealised portrait of Geyer, who is represented in it by a kind of four-note leitmotif. The concerto consists of two movements in a rhapsodic style; the first conjures up an image of the composer's beloved, while the second evokes the admired artist. Geyer never played the concerto and at the end of 1907 made it quite clear that she did not return Bartók's passion; however, she still asked him to send her the manuscript of the work. He complied with her request, but the concerto was then put away in a drawer and forgotten about, and remained unpublished during the composer's lifetime. It did not come to light until after Geyer's death, when the Swiss conductor Paul Sacher (1906–1999) invited the violinist Hansheinz Schneeberger to give the rst performance in Basel on 30 May 1958.
Though he was a fine pianist, Bartók did not play the violin, but despite this he had a perfect grasp of the capabilities of string instruments. For many years, until the belated discovery of the 1907 concerto, it was assumed that he had produced only one violin concerto. The composer began work on his Violin Concerto No.2 in 1936 and dedicated it to the great violinist Zoltán Székely, the leader of the Hungarian Quartet and of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, who played it for the rst time on 23 March 1939 with the Amsterdam orchestra under Willem Mengelberg, shortly before Bartók's departure for the United States. Before completing the concerto, Bartók set it aside for a while in order to fulfil a commission from the American clarinettist Benny Goodman, which resulted in a trio for violin, clarinet and piano, 'Contrasts'. Two other key works – Music for strings, percussion and celesta, and the Sonata for two pianos and percussion – also date from this period.
Bartók's Violin Concerto No.2 is one of the greatest of all works in this genre, and deserves to stand alongside the concertos of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms. This deeply soul-searching piece, which marks the beginning of Bartók's final period, is a mature work in which the composer achieves a remarkable equilibrium. He had intended to write a set of variations for violin and orchestra (a genre that was dear to his heart), but in the end gave way to Székely, whose preference was for the traditional three-movement concerto form. Although this compromise meant going against his own artistic instincts, Bartók's verdict on the finished concerto was that the orchestration was perfect.
Edited extract from the booklet text.