Piano Concerto No.2

Bartók was well aware of the problems associated with his First Piano Concerto. Interviewed in a Swiss newspaper in 1939, thirteen years after it was written, he said he considered it “a good composition” but felt that its construction was “a bit - or, indeed, one might say very - difficult for orchestra and audience alike. That was why,” he went on, “I wished to compose as a counterpart the Piano Concerto No.2 with fewer difficulties for the orchestra and more pleasing in its thematic material. That is why most of the themes in the piece are more popular and light in character.” The basic difference, in fact, is that, while the two most prominent stylistic elements of the First Piano Concerto are both still very much in evidence in the Second five years later, the emphasis is reversed so that the neo-Baroque now predominates over the primitive.

Another feature of the Second Concerto, which is also present in the First but rather less obviously, is the influence of Stravinsky. It is not just that by leaving the strings out of the first movement Bartók happened to secure here a sound comparable to that of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind. Nor is it just that some aspects of the piano writing in Petrushka are reflected from time to time in the Second Concerto. It is more to that point - unless Stravinsky and Bartók chanced upon the same folk-song source - that the trumpet fanfare which opens the Second Concerto is an accelerated version of the big tune in the Finale of The Firebird. More than a mere opening gesture, the fanfare generates much of both the rhythmic energy and the thematic interest of the first and third movements.

Another function of the trumpet fanfare is that, in the first movement, it acts as a kind of ritornello in a structure which is an ingenious combination of concerto grosso and sonata form. Between the Petrushka-like first subject introduced immediately after it by the soloist and the second subject of quietly arpeggiated piano chords and triangle colours, the fanfare reappears twice in its original form on brass and many more times in fragmentary woodwind variants. It holds together a short but eventful development section and signals the beginning of the recapitulation by projecting itself in inversion through a seven-part canon on trumpets and horns. Rising dramatically from tuba to piccolo, the fanfare theme introduces a hyper-active piano cadenza and, discreetly by-passing the second subject, motivates a surprisingly relaxed and witty coda.

The slow movement incorporates one of the most inspired of Bartók’s night-music fantasies. In the Adagio outer sections a chorale melody moves slowly through the darkness of pianissimo muted strings in parallel fifths to meet an even slower but eloquent recitative on piano and timpani. The middle section is a Presto scherzo which begins and ends as a frantic pursuit but which includes at its centre a hallucinatory evocation of nocturnal nature sounds from woodwind and muted brass over a background of quiet piano tremolandos and trilled strings.

To complete the arch form, the last movement reverts to the material of the first. It has its own, primitive rondo theme - introduced by timpani and piano after the preliminary flourish - but the episodes between its several reappearances recall the opening themes of the work, not least the trumpet fanfare. As in the first movement, the recapitulation presents the themes in inversion and again, after a last entry of the rondo theme, there is an imaginative coda, this one offering lyrical memories of the second-subject melody omitted from the recapitulation of the first movement. The trumpet fanfare finally sets the movement back on course to its joyful G major ending.

The Second Piano Concerto was first performed in Frankfurt in March 1933 with the composer as soloist and Hans Rosbaud conducting the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra. It was Bartók’s last appearance in Germany.

Gerald Larner©