Viola Concerto (prepared for publication by Tibor Serly)

Less than three weeks before he died, in unhappy exile in New York in September 1945, Bartók wrote to the Scottish violist William Primrose with the news that “your Viola Concerto is ready in draft, so that only the score has to be written, which means a purely mechanical work, so to speak.” Sadly, preoccupied as he was by the more urgent task of finishing the Third Piano Concerto, that work was never done.

Invited by the Bartók family to complete the two scores the composer left unfinished, Tibor Serly - a fellow Hungarian, trusted associate, violist and composer himself - had no problem with the Piano Concerto: all he had to do was orchestrate the last 17 bars. The Viola Concerto, to which Bartók had devoted comparatively little time, was a different matter. Given a confusing 14-page draft, with insoluble problems of continuity and with nothing more to go on at some points than the unadorned viola part, he found that ‘what for Bartók would have been “a purely mechanical work” involved a lengthy task that required infinite patience and painstaking labour.’

After three or four years of diligent application, Serly completed a score so convincing that Primrose was moved to greet it as “a sensitive and inspired work, a real contribution to the literature of the viola.” It has always had its critics, not least for its allegedly illogical construction and thin textures. Since Bartók’s draft was released for publication in facsimile, the critics have increased in number, arguing that Serly added or changed too much and included both too little and too much of the original material. Two rival versions, each offering different solutions to the same problems, have been published and recorded - one edited by the composer’s son Peter Bartók, the other (available, for copyright reasons, only in Australia and New Zealand) by Csaba Erdélyi. Even so, since its first performance by William Primrose with Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1949, Bartók’s Viola Concerto in Serly’s edition has become the most frequently played work of its kind.

Like the first movements of most of Bartók’s concertos, the opening Moderato (all the tempo headings are Serly’s, by the way) is a sonata-form construction. Much of the material, above all the lyrical main theme introduced by the viola at the start of the work, is designed to exploit the reflective nature of the solo instrument. But, beginning with the chromatically scurrying approach to the tuneful second subject, there is a prominent bravura element too. Indeed, there are two cadenzas. One leads into the recapitulation and continues as a counterpoint over the re-entry of the main theme on woodwind. The other contributes to the problematical lento parlando transition that, by way of a bassoon solo interpolated entirely on Serly’s initiative, links the first to the second

movement.

For guidance on the slow movement Serly seems to have turned to the Adagio religioso of the Third Piano Concerto. Certainly, that is where he found the tempo heading so well suited to the contemplative outer sections and the melodious utterances of the soloist against sustained harmonies on strings and wind. It was there too that he found inspiration for the woodwind flourishes which he added to a sobbing motif high on the viola, creating a nature-music middle section in the same spirit as that of the equivalent movement of the Piano Concerto.

The Allegro vivace, which is linked to the slow movement by an allegretto transition passage with firmly articulated multi-stopped fourth chords on the viola, is perhaps the most convincing movement of the three. A kind of moto perpetuo vigorously motivated by Hungarian dance rhythms, it includes at its centre an attractive bagpipe episode based on a rustic tune (introduced by oboe over off-beat open fifths in the strings) believed by Peter Bartók to be of Scottish origin and featured here as a tribute to the violist who commissioned the work in the first place.

Gerald Larner ©2004