Bartók & Tchaikovsky

Béla Bartók's explosive first piano concerto premiered in 1927, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting and the composer himself at the keyboard. The concerto is marked by dissonances and clusters, syncopation and furious virtuosity - Bartók employed a percussive hammering technique (martellato). Critics were outraged, but for Bartók there was no turning back; he had found his new voice.

Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere of his fifth symphony in November 1888 - a work born from considerable self-doubt yet immediately became a great success. The symphony is a confrontation with fate, much like the fourth symphony written ten years earlier. Shortly before composing it, he wrote: "Introduction. Complete submission to fate, or - which is the same - to the inscrutable predestination of providence. (...) A wonderful programme - if only it could be carried out." The fate motif runs through the entire work, but in the end light triumphs.

György Ligeti's Concert Românesc (1951) draws its soundscape from Romanian mountain peaks, shepherd's pipes and wild village celebrations. Despite its - by today's standards - inoffensive musical language, the communist regime immediately banned the work. Ligeti himself wrote: "Under Stalin's dictatorship, even folk music was permitted only in a 'politically correct' form - in other words, only if it was forced into the straitjacket of socialist realism's norms." The piece did not premiere until twenty years later, and on a December night in 1956 Ligeti fled Hungary and crossed the border into Austria.

Programme
György Ligeti - Concert Românesc (approx. 12 min)
Béla Bartók - Piano Concerto No. 1 (approx. 25 min)
Intermission 25 minutes
Piotr Tchaikovsky - Symphony No. 5 (approx. 47 min)