Duo Concertante (1983)

Antal Doráti was far better known in his lifetime as a conductor than as a composer and, indeed, he had such a successful international conducting career that he had little time for composition. As a student at the National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music, however, he had studied with Bartók, Kodály and Léo Weiner and had inherited a composing tradition which never left him and which inspired him, in spite of his conducting commitments, to complete twenty or so scores - all of them written in a style he described as “recognizably contemporary but not afraid of melody.”

The Duo Concertante, which he wrote for the Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger and the Hungarian pianist András Schiff in 1983, is a brilliantly witty, sensationally scored commentary on the old-fashioned Hungarian rhapsody. So it is divided into two parts, a slow and declamatory opening section corresponding to the traditional lassú and a quick movement corresponding to the friss. The opening Lento, which makes much of the characteristic Hungarian snap - an accented short note followed by a longer one - is a highly dramatic improvisation, its melodic line entrusted mainly to the eloquent voice of the oboe but also echoed, anticipated, contradicted and sometimes weirdly coloured by the piano.

The Molto vivace is for the most part a virtuoso chase where the oboe is accompanied by chord clusters and combined with the piano in a variety of canonic imitations. There is, however, a slower and more expressive middle section - after which the virtuoso activity is resumed at a quicker tempo than before and accelerated into a quicker tempo still. The prestissimo section that begins with a low rumble on the piano does not lead directly into the closing bars but takes in a brief memory of the opening Lento on the way into the coda.

Antal Doráti was far better known in his lifetime as a conductor than as a composer and, indeed, he had such a successful international conducting career that he had little time for composition. As a student at the National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music, however, he had studied with Bartók, Kodály and Léo Weiner and had inherited a composing tradition which never left him and which inspired him, in spite of his conducting commitments, to complete twenty or so scores - all of them written in a style he described as “recognizably contemporary but not afraid of melody.”

The Duo Concertante, which he wrote for the Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger and the Hungarian pianist András Schiff in 1983, is a brilliantly witty, sensationally scored commentary on the traditional Hungarian rhapsody. The oboe is not normally associated with the Hungarian rhapsody, as Holliger himself has remarked, but in the Duo Concertante it is brought into such a fruitful, if not always comfortable, relationship with the piano that their combined sound seems as though it is directly developed from the Hungarian kind of material Doráti offers the two instruments.

Structurally, the Duo Concertante is divided into two parts, a slow and declamatory opening section corresponding to the traditional lassú and a quick movement corresponding to the friss. The opening Lento, which makes much of the characteristic Hungarian snap - an accented short note followed by a longer one - is a highly dramatic improvisation, its melodic line entrusted mainly to the eloquent voice of the oboe but also echoed, anticipated, contradicted and sometimes weirdly coloured by the piano. The Molto vivace is for the most part a virtuoso chase where the oboe is accompanied by chord clusters and combined with the piano in a variety of canonic imitations. There is, however, a slower and more expressive middle section - after which the virtuoso activity is resumed at a quicker tempo than before and accelerated into a quicker tempo still. The prestissimo section that begins with a low rumble on the piano does not lead directly into the closing bars but takes in a brief memory of the opening Lento on the way into the coda.