Bartok: Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2. - Isaac Stern, Eugene Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Boston Symphony Orchestra - sound recording reviews

National Review, June 3, 1996 by Ralph De Toledano

IF memory serves me, I first heard a Bela Bartok composition in a recording of Contrasts, a work he wrote for Benny Goodman and Joseph Szigeti. Since then, I have heard a good deal of Bartok's music, and I have no doubt that he challenged Stravinsky and left the sterilities of Arnold Schoenberg far behind. Bartok was a post-modernist romantic, seized by emotion and melody -- as Stravinsky was a post-modernist classicist. These labels are, of course, meaningless. Of significance is what is on the score and what reaches the ear. So I would venture to say that a half-dozen decades from today, Bela Bartok will be a far more important part of our musical heritage than those whose elbows were sharper, while others of his contemporaries will be all but forgotten.

If you doubt it, I urge you to listen to Bartok's Violin Concertos Nos. 1 & 2, as recorded by Isaac Stern and, respectively, Eugene Ormandy and Leonard Bernstein (Sony SMK 64502). The first was written in 1908, the second in 1938. It goes without saying that Stern is superb in tone, phrasing, and the other tangibles of great performance. But what is most interesting is that one concerto blends into the other as if they had been written in close sequence. Meanwhile, the Concerto for Orchestra, written two years before his death in 1945, demonstrates that there can be deep emotional and melodic content in the reaches of atonality (Philips 442783-2). This is a gripping, magnificent work, certainly Bartok's greatest, and it is fully realized in its traversal by Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony.

''My sole ambition as a composer is to hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future,'' Franz Liszt remarked, at the same time describing himself as ''a mixture of gypsy and Franciscan.'' That javelin struck Bartok's creative corpus, but it also buried itself in the meat of musical history. Among critics, only Jacques Barzun -- to whose knowledge, intuitions, and apercus those of us who approach music are forever indebted -- has properly acknowledged the greatness of Liszt as innovator and composer. Yet anyone who listens to his concertos, the ultimate in the symbiosis of piano and orchestra, must be obliged to offer Liszt's work a place in the pantheon along with Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth.

Here is statement and drama, harmony and melody, and -- forgive me, dear reader, sensibility and passion. The No. 1 in E Flat (and Mozart has told us what a great key that is) and the No. 2 in A are now with us in a recording by Sviatoslav Richter, the London Symphony Orchestra, and conductor Kirill Kondrashin (Philips 466 200-2). Given my druthers, I would have preferred Paul Badura-Skoda -- who brings both technique and intellectual depth to his every performance -- as soloist. But Richter has a certain power which drives everything before it. Liszt is difficult to play and easy to listen to -- and he reaches his listeners at every intellectual level.

Once upon a time it was considered slightly outre -- like singing Verdi with a hurdy-gurdy -- to respond to Tchaikovsky. This has changed, so I need not apologize for recommending Mstislav Rostropovich's recording, with the London Philharmonic, of Tchaikovsky's Symphonies 1 through 6 (EMI 7243 5 65709 2 4). Indeed Tchaikovsky was a completely respectable composer -- and if he was sometimes over-florid, well, that's a characteristic of the Russians and does not make them inferior to the Germans. Tchaikovsky was wonderfully rich in the melodic -- and his harmonics and dynamics reach down to where many of us live. Rostropovich, Tchaikovsky's fellow Russian, does not merely wave a baton at a recording session, and we feel his empathy. A Russian friend once said to me, ''In Russia, when you talk to a general, shut up!'' Rostropovich says, ''When you listen to the way I conduct Tchaikovsky, enjoy!''

It is another thing with Anton Bruckner. His music, one critic tells us, ''appeared simple and unadventurous, yet his unsophisticated nature was to produce gigantic compositions.'' Perhaps Bruckner, born of peasant stock, was ''unadventurous.'' His work derived directly from Beethoven, and was influenced to a small degree by Wagner. But where lack of sophistication comes into the musical equation, it is hard to tell. He wrote symphonies of great length, full of religious angst -- and perhaps this is unfashionable today, but it is significant in any recording by Wilhelm Furtwangler, one of the very great conductors of the twentieth century. Furtwangler saw in Bruckner the ''supertemporal'' and wrote that ''in his art, he was concerned with eternity.'' Eternity, of course, has nothing to do with musical excellence, and Bruckner was plagued by critics whose irreligiosity matched that of our times. His contemporaries had their revenge by making cuts in his music as then performed -- the finale of his Fifth Symphony suffering the loss of 122 measures, which are present in this recording by Furtwangler (EMI 565750 2). A Catholic, Bruckner was not tortured, as was the converted Jew Mahler, by seeking in faith an answer to his mortal preoccupations. But those preoccupations are there, and they give richness and validity to his music.