Bartók: The Wooden Prince, Hungarian Sketches, The Miraculous Mandarin & Concerto for Orchestra

Featuring

Neeme Järvi
Philharmonia Orchestra
London Voices
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Béla Bartók

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Composition History

The Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who provided a commission and a partial payment to Bartók while he was ill.

Compositional Technique

Bartók's Hungarian Pictures are orchestral arrangements of earlier piano pieces, some based on actual folksongs and dances, others drawing on the peasant idiom.

Composition History

The Wooden Prince, a dance-pantomime, was created by Bartók in the hope of forming a double bill with his opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, which was awaiting its first performance.

Composition History

Bartók composed the Concerto for Orchestra in his last year of life, after a four-year period of creative inactivity following his arrival in New York as a refugee from fascism.

Critical Reception

The premiere of The Wooden Prince on May 12, 1917, was an enormous success, despite predictions of a fiasco from the Budapest Opera.

Critical Reception

The Miraculous Mandarin caused such an outcry at its 1926 Cologne premiere that the city's mayor banned it before a second performance could take place.