Bartok in Abundance

As this columnist frequently has occasion to lament, the quantity of recordings of a composer’s music does not necessarily reflect or translate into frequency of live performance.

Take the case of Bartok, all of whose major works have multiple listings in the current Schwann CD catalogue while in concert he is regularly represented only by his readily accessible, Romantically tinged Concerto for Orchestra and, for a very different audience, his less compromising string quartets. Even the once very popular Second Violin Concerto seems to have been replaced as the 20th-Century vehicle of choice by the Berg and Prokofiev concertos.

But any orchestra with a presumption to international stature has to record the Concerto for Orchestra, with two relatively recent additions to the roster of world-class ensembles now attempting it for the first time: the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under Andre Previn (Telarc 80174), and the Montreal Symphony, under Charles Dutoit (London 421 443).

Previn’s conception is inappropriately benign, the sort of laid-back performance of volatile music with which Previn came to critical grief during his recently concluded tenure as music director here. Dutoit is, almost as predictably, taut, quick-witted and flashy.

Previn couples his Bartok with a bloodless, disinterested run through of Janacek’s wonderfully ferocious and grandiose Sinfonietta. But rather than excoriating the conductor, should one perhaps lament his being saddled with music to which he is temperamentally unsuited?

No such problem for Dutoit, who gives us a becomingly high-voltage rendition of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

The Second Violin Concerto has long been a speciality of Yehudi Menuhin, but in only one of his three commercial recordings are tone and technique sufficiently under control to allow the musicianship to shine through: his first, dating from 1953--a soaring, lush-toned (once past some early scraping) piece of violin magic. And there are rewards as well in the partnering of the Philharmonia Orchestra under Wilhelm Furtwangler, who abjures his normal deep-think to provide vital, crisply rhythmical support for the soloist.

The recording is, interestingly, available in different couplings on different labels: As one of Angel’s mid-priced Great Recordings of the Century (69804) it is accompanied by Bartok’s last completed work, the Sonata for Solo Violin. Menuhin--to whom it is dedicated--while hardly romanticizing a very tough-minded score, does deliver it with more coloristic variety than subsequent interpreters.

On the even less-expensive Price-Less label (15100) the Violin Concerto is coupled with the scintillating Third Piano Concerto in a reading of delectable vivacity by the Hungarian pianist Annie Fischer, ably supported by the London Symphony under Igor Markevitch.

Bartok left only the most rudimentary sketches for the Viola Concerto at his death in 1945. As interpreted--or, more likely, largely composed (in the Bartok idiom)--by his pupil, Tibor Serly, it ultimately provided an attractive, grateful vehicle for the revered William Primrose.

Primrose’s poignant if roughly recorded first performance of the concerto in France in 1950 has been made available as part of an invaluable Bartok program in which an under-appreciated master among conductors of 20th-Century music, Ernest Bour, conducts the Orchestre National (Mode Laser CD 672 006).

Bour and his Parisians also offer--from handsomely recorded 1969 broadcasts--the “Miraculous Mandarin” Suite, vastly spookier and more exciting under these live circumstances than in any studio-made version; and a pulverizing assault on the Second Piano Concerto by soloist Claude Helffer, who will have no truck with any of this effete Bartok-needn’t-be-percussive nonsense. Terrific stuff.

The inexhaustible riches of the six string quartets can be sampled in two recent CD issues. The Emerson Quartet presents fast-paced, hard-driven, quintessentially modern performances (Deutsche Grammophon 423 657, two CDs) that revive memories of the Juilliard Quartet’s first (circa 1950) recordings.

Coming from a totally different interpretive direction, the New Hungarian Quartet, which flourished briefly a decade ago, presents warm-toned, probing interpretations on three budget CDs (Pantheon 19149) reflecting the four decades of stylistic growth and change that separate the first from the last of these works.

As technicians, however, the New Hungarians are hardly in the same league as the brilliant Emersons.