The score for “Concerto for Orchestra” was written in only two months at the health resort of Saranac Lake in upstate New York and completed on October 8, 1943. The first performance, an enormous success with audience and critics, was given by the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky on December 1, 1944.
Bartok, who was in Boston for the premiere with his wife, Ditta Pásztory, reported: “We went there for the rehearsals and performances – after having obtained the grudgingly granted permission of my doctor for this trip…. The performance was excellent. Koussevitzky says it is the ‘best orchestra piece of the last 25 years’ .
Bartók provided the following brief program note for the occasion:
“The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one… The title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat the single orchestral instruments in a concertant or soloistic manner. The ‘virtuoso’ treatment appears, for instance, in the fugato sections of the development of the first movement (brass instruments), or in the “perpetuum mobile” passage of the principal theme in the last movement, and especially in the second movement, in which pairs of instruments consecutively appear with brilliant passages.”
Here is a performance of the Concerto for Orchestra by Bela Bartok:
