Piano Concerto No.1

In increasing international demand as a composer-pianist in the 1920s, Bartók badly needed a concerto to add to his repertoire. The nearest thing he had was his Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, Op.1, but that was twenty years out of date and, although he did play it on his concert tours, it was not at all representative of the composer he had since become. In fact, little of his piano music was - which is why, in five or six months in 1926, he completed not only the First Piano Concerto but also two important solo works, the Sonata and Out of Doors, and the Nine Little Piano Pieces as well.

At least a few of the audience at the 1927 ISCM Festival in Frankfurt where the First Piano Concerto was first performed, with the composer as soloist and Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting, must have had some idea of what to expect. But if the prophetic Allegro Barbaro of 1911 had prepared them to some extent for what they heard they cannot have been prepared for what they did not hear. The disconcerting aspect of the work was probably not so much the percussive treatment of the piano as the suppression of developed lyrical melody.

Percussive articulation had long been a valued item in the keyboard-composer’s equipment, not only in piano music but, though the mechanism behind it is quite different, in harpsichord music too. Even so, in spite of much that is characteristically baroque in it, the first movement of Bartók’s First Piano Concerto is not just another modern reflection of the keyboard toccata. The distinctive feature of the work, linked to its neo-baroque inspiration, is its primitivism which, whatever it owes to the Stravinsky of the Rite of Spring and Les Noces, derives essentially from the composer’s long-term research into the oldest forms of folk music, not least in North Africa.

The ritualistic Allegro moderato introduction, where the piano initiates the low drumming and horns and bassoons introduce the aboriginal thematic material, sets the scene for much that is to happen later. Even when the soloist leads the acceleration into the main Allegro he goes on drumming on one note for a few bars before running into the dry scalic figures which represent the first subject. The second subject, introduced by the piano after a fierce exchange of blows with the orchestra, is more shapely but it is hurried along by the persistent quaver movement on the strings behind it. By the end of the exposition Bartók has induced a claustrophobia of narrow melodic intervals, cramped textures and aggressive rhythms. Whatever happens in the development – which is illuminated from time to time by canonic passages on woodwind and brass and teased by capricious and even legato variants of the main themes at a reduced tempo – the sense of confinement is still there, ready to be intensified by the accelerando and the tempo changes which lead eventually and frenetically into the recapitulation.

In the Andante, to compensate for treating the piano as a percussion instrument, Bartók treats unpitched percussion as melody instruments. The first theme of the movement (from which all the strings and most of the brass are excluded) is a colour melody moving between timpani, suspended cymbal, side drum with snare and side drum without, and staccato dissonances on the piano. The percussion colouring is sustained as a background to a broadly palindromic construction centred on an exotic episode of chord clusters on the piano and a distinctly Arab melody weaving its way gradually through the whole of the woodwind section.

That melodious episode is the last. A heavily percussive transition, enthusiastically greeted by trombone glissandi, links the Andante directly with the Allegro molto and what is basically a reworking of the material of the first movement at a quicker tempo and with no inhibitions on its primitive rhythmic energy. There is one slower passage which, with its legato lines in double octaves on the piano linked to a lyrical entry of the strings, seems as though it is about to broaden into a conventionally triumphant climax. But it is immediately swept away in an impulse which, though it is briefly relaxed here and there, has no time for convention.

In increasing international demand as a composer-pianist in the 1920s, Bartók badly needed a concerto to add to his repertoire. The nearest thing he had was his Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, Op.1, but that was twenty years out of date and, although he did play it on his concert tours, it was not at all representative of the composer he had since become. In fact, little of his piano music was – which is why, in five or six months in 1926, he completed not only the First Piano Concerto but also two important solo works, the Sonata and Out of Doors, and the Nine Little Piano Pieces as well.

Many of the audience at the 1927 ISCM Festival in Frankfurt where the First Piano Concerto was first performed, with the composer as soloist and Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting, must have had some idea of what to expect. As supporters of the International Society for Contemporary Music, they would have known that Bartók was unlikely to produce anything like, say, the two Rachmaninov concertos current at the time or even, among more recent and more radical works of their kind, the Third Piano Concerto of Prokofiev or Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind. But if Bartók’s prophetic Allegro Barbaro of 1911 had prepared them to some extent for what they heard they cannot have been prepared for what they did not hear. The disconcerting aspect of the work was probably not so much the percussive treatment of the piano as the suppression of developed lyrical melody.

Percussive articulation had long been a valued item in the keyboard-composer’s equipment, not only in piano music but, though the mechanism behind it is quite different, in harpsichord music too. Even so, in spite of much that is characteristically baroque in it, the first movement of Bartók’s First Piano Concerto is not just another modern reflection of the keyboard toccata. The distinctive feature of the work, linked to its neo-baroque inspiration, is its primitivism which, whatever it owes to the Stravinsky of the Rite of Spring and Les Noces, derives essentially from the composer’s long-term research into the oldest forms of folk music, not least in North Africa.

The ritualistic Allegro moderato introduction, where the piano initiates the low drumming and horns and bassoons introduce the aboriginal thematic material, sets the scene for much that is to happen later. When the soloist leads the acceleration into the main Allegro he goes on drumming on one note for a few bars before running into the dry scalic figures which represent the first subject. The second subject, introduced by the piano after a fierce exchange of blows with the orchestra, is more shapely but it is hurried along by the persistent quaver movement on the strings behind it. By the end of the exposition Bartók has induced a claustrophobia of narrow melodic intervals, cramped textures and aggressive rhythms. Whatever happens in the development – which is illuminated from time to time by canonic passages on woodwind and brass and teased by capricious and even legato variants of the main themes at a reduced tempo – the sense of confinement is still there, ready to be intensified by the accelerando and the tempo changes which lead eventually and frenetically into the recapitulation.

In the Andante, to compensate for treating the piano as a percussion instrument, Bartók treats even unpitched percussion as melody instruments. The first theme of the movement (from which all the strings and most of the brass are excluded) is a colour melody moving between timpani, suspended cymbal, side drum with snare and side drum without, and staccato dissonances on the piano. The percussion colouring is sustained as a background to a broadly palindromic construction centred on an exotic episode of chord clusters on the piano and a distinctly Arabian melody weaving its way gradually through the whole of the woodwind section.

That melodious episode is the last. A heavily percussive transition, enthusiastically greeted by trombone glissandi, links the Andante directly with the Allegro molto and what is basically a reworking of the material of the first movement at a quicker tempo and with no inhibitions on its primitive rhythmic energy. There is one slower passage which, with its legato lines in double octaves on the piano linked to a lyrical entry of the strings, seems as though it is about to broaden into a conventionally triumphant climax. But it is immediately swept away in an impulse which, though it is briefly relaxed here and there, has no time for convention.