Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra

Building a Library: Emily MacGregor recommends a her favourite recording of Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra.

For Bartók, the circumstances surrounding the composition of his Concerto for Orchestra could hardly have been more miserable. In 1940 he fled his native Hungary to escape the Nazis and spent the remaining five years of his life in the United States, those years blighted by despair, painful illness and abject poverty. But unknown to Bartók, two fellow Hungarians, violinist Joseph Szigeti and conductor Fritz Reiner, conspired to persuade Serge Koussevitzky to offer a generous commission. In 1943, the glamorous conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra visited Bartók in his New York hospital, and flamboyantly presented the composer, not only with a commission for an orchestral work but also a $500 down payment. Bartók began work in August and finished the Concerto for Orchestra just under three moths later. It spotlights, often with brilliance and playfulness, all the sections of the orchestra and perhaps only its central Elegy, which Bartók called a 'lugubrious death-song', reflects the circumstances of its composition. The work's recorded history begins at the beginning in 1944 with Koussevitzky and the Boston SO and has been much recorded ever since, a 20th-century classic by one of the century's greatest composers.