Concerto for Orchestra

Allegro risoluto - Largo - Allegro risoluto - Largo - Allegro risoluto

While there is no mistaking the Hungarian identity of the composer of the Concerto for Orchestra, Kodály does not flaunt it here as demonstratively as he does in more popular scores like Háry János and the Dances of Galánta or the Dances of Marosszék. Having been commissioned to write a piece to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1941, he no doubt felt that a less localised musical language would be appropriate to the international occasion. His colleague and compatriot Béla Bartók was to have a similar feeling when he wrote his Concerto for Orchestra for the Boston Symphony two or three years later, very different kind of construction though that turned out to be: whereas Bartók’s is in five distinct movements, Kodály’s is in just one, alternating quick and slow sections in ever shorter durations.

The brisk main theme of Kodály’s Concerto for Orchestra is clearly folky in character but, because it is based on the pentatonic scale common to many musical cultures, it is not too specifically Hungarian. It is not a particularly inspired melodic idea either. It is, on the other hand, valuable material for demonstrating the vitality, rhythmic precision and agility of the orchestra as it bounces from strings to woodwind and brass and back again. There is also a more sophisticated second theme, chromatic in line and syncopated in rhythm, proposed by the four horns and seconded by most of the woodwind. Jostled by trumpets and others eager to return to the opening subject, it is driven to an early climax over an insistent timpani reminder of the main theme, which is duly restored to its original prominence but with even more exuberant vitality.

The first Largo section features a rather more Hungarian and very much more expressive melody introduced by a solo cello. It is developed by way of an ensemble of solo strings and the occasional woodwind intervention through increasingly abundant contrapuntal textures and a sonorous brass chorale to a searing climax brilliantly sustained by high trumpets against excited figuration on strings and woodwind.

The second half of the work, although it plainly recalls the Allegro risoluto and Largo sections, is not so much a recapitulation as a new treatment of the now familiar material and a change of structural emphasis between its various components. An ingeniously simulated fugue on the main theme of the Allegro risoluto delays the return of the syncopated second theme, which now makes its dramatic re-entry as a counterpoint on horns to the continuing repetitions of the other theme on woodwind and strings. As for the expressive Largo melody, it reappears first in an abbreviated form on clarinet and, far from aspiring to the passionate eloquence which it achieved in the first Largo section, it dissolves into a poetic cadenza of pastoral piping on woodwind - giving the Allegro risoluto main theme a chance to assert its irrepressible vitality once again and to make off with the definitive last word.