Piano Concerto No.3

The Third Piano Concerto is the last work Bartók completed – or nearly completed: the final seventeen bars were orchestrated by his pupil Tibor Serly, whose ill-timed visit to Bartók on what was to be his last day in his New York apartment had almost certainly prevented the composer from scoring them himself. Significantly, although he had definite commissions to fulfil at the time – for the Viola Concerto, which was well advanced at the time of his death, and a seventh string quartet, for which only minimal sketches exist – Bartók had treated the Third Piano Concerto as an urgent priority. Rather than commit himself to a commission for a concerto for two pianos for Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson, he had undertaken the solo concerto as a kind of insurance policy for his wife, Ditta Pásztory. “I should like to write a piano concerto for Mother,” he had written to their son Peter. “If she could play it in three or four places then it would bring in about as much money as the one commission I refused…”

Ditta, Bartók’s second wife and twenty-two years his junior, was a good pianist but, by all accounts, better equipped for Mozart than for the heavily-muscled bravura of her husband’s first two concertos. In fact, she had tried the Second and found it beyond her. The Third Piano Concerto was written specifically to suit her technique and,though less consciously perhaps, her personality – which explains much that might seem anomalous about it.

So the work begins not with a tattoo or a fanfare but with a rustling of upper strings and a melody elegantly projected against it in octaves on the piano. A Hungarian-in-New-York inspiration, offering just a hint of a jazz inflection in its decorative line, it is presented with an attractive rhythmic flexibility and serene E major harmonies. The playful second subject no doubt represents in its twin themes – one marked grazioso, the other scherzando – further aspects of Ditta’s personality. The heroic dimension is not entirely absent, as the pianist confirms at the beginning of the development section with sonorous arpeggios accompanying a firmly outlined version of the main theme on woodwind. But virtuosity here is mainly a matter of spontaneous and brilliantly detailed elaboration of the melodic line, above all in the recapitulation. The jazz element is recalled in the discreetly cool ending.

The Adagio religioso heading of the second movement is not a confession of faith on Bartók’s part. It is an allusion – stimulated by an apparent improvement in the composer’s health as he worked on the score at Saranac Lake in the summer of 1944 – to the”Hymn of thanksgiving” in the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op.132. Introduced by strings in a manner not unlike the beginning of the Beethoven Adagio, the main theme of Bartók’s Adagio is an expressive piano chorale. Contrasting with it in the middle section is one of Bartók’s most captivating nature studies, a diurnal version of his “night music”fantasies magically coloured by echoes of the birdsong he had noted down on his walks in the Asheville forest. On its return, the chorale is carried by woodwind while the piano weaves a decorative counterpoint around it.

The quiet E major harmonies at the end of the Adagio religioso are brushed aside by a piano flourish and the energetically syncopated main theme of the finale (the Allegro vivace heading was supplied by Serly). Here at last are the percussive chords and aggressive folk-dance rhythms familiar from the earlier concertos – but not for long. Before each of the next two appearances of the main theme there is a baroque-style episode, the first featuring a fugue initiated by the soloist and the second a graceful dance on the piano with a canonic counterpoint in the strings. Full-scale energy is restored with the last appearance of the main theme and intensified in the coda.

The first performance of Third Piano Concerto was given by György Sándor and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy in February 1946, seventeen months after the composer’s death. Ditta Pásztory could not bring herself to perform it until many years later.

Gerald Larner © 2008