It was a performance of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra in 1903 that awakened Béla Bartók’s creative energies as a music student, and the inspiration led to Bartók’s first formative works. Still, guest conductor Marek Janowski’s pairing of Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto with Zarathustra’s "spiritual successor," Eine Alpensinfonie ("An Alpine Symphony"), makes for an odd Boston Symphony Orchestra program. Although only 15 years separate the composition of the two pieces, the divide between their composers’ respective approaches places these works in almost completely different artistic worlds.
Strauss began work on his Alpine Symphony in 1911, a dark time in his personal life. The death of Gustav Mahler had deprived him of not only a friend but also one of the very few living composers whose talent he deemed the equal of his own. Deeply affected, he turned to The Antichrist, by Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher whose Zarathustra he had drawn on 15 years earlier. "I will call my Alpine Symphony the Antichrist," he wrote in his diary, "because in it there is moral purification by means of one’s own strength . . . , worship of glorious eternal nature."
The piece wasn’t completed until 1915, and by then Strauss had dropped the reference to Nietzsche, perhaps because he was fearful of appearing too confessional to his public. What remains is the musical narrative of the ascent and descent of a vast, rugged mountain. Strauss’s uncanny ability to capture the detail of the scenes he composes — a hike along a stream, the scaling of a glacier, even a wrong turn through the thicket — is apparent everywhere. So is his skill in handling a mammoth orchestra that numbers around 120. None of this, though, stopped a chorus of critics from complaining of childish melodies wrapped in bombastic orchestral garb. The whole thing, they thought, was little more than fancy sound effects. (This would make Strauss the John Williams of his time, more or less.)
By the time Bartók wrote the second of his three piano concertos, in 1931, his own artistic temperament had reached full maturity, and whatever elements of Strauss’s late romanticism had fired his imagination had been left far behind. He had honed a musical language that combined open harmonic dissonance, formal rigor, and aspects of the folk music of his native Hungary – all of it washed down with an utterly original ear for instrumental timbre.
These are important ingredients in the Second Concerto, which opens with a pianistic flourish and a theme in the trumpets that alludes to Stravinsky’s Firebird. In contrast to the lushness of Strauss’s orchestral writing, Bartók relies throughout the work on specific instrumental combinations to give the music color and variety.
The strings do not play in the first movement, which has the sound of an exuberant extended fanfare. The slow movement begins with a dialogue between a ghostly chorale tune from the strings and speech-like figures from the piano accompanied by the timpani. A wild, shadowy scherzo builds to a furious climax and then disappears as suddenly as it appeared. The whole thing is a kind of night music, full of indistinct shapes and shades. Where Strauss illustrates, Bartók evokes. The finale is largely a variation on the first movement, so that the piece, like several of Bartók’s other major works, has an arch shape. The piano writing is extremely taxing all the way through — you’re reminded that the composer was one of the foremost piano virtuosi of his day.
And if the pairing makes for an odd program, well, odd programs often have a way of making sense in the moment. Besides, this weekend will your last chance to hear the BSO before Pops takes over for the holiday season. The eminent Hungarian pianist Zoltán Kocsis is the soloist in the Bartók. Performances take place at Symphony Hall December 5 at 8 p.m., December 6 at 1:30, and December 7 at 8. Tickets range from $25 to $84; call (617) 266-1200.
ALREADY ’TIS THE SEASON. It’s no good asking why Christmas seems to take over before Thanksgiving is done. It just does. So put down the turkey and start figuring out where you’re going to hear that perennial holiday chestnut, Handel’s Messiah, this year. Always a safe bet is the Handel & Haydn Society, where Grant Llewellyn is in his second year as artistic director. He’ll conduct H&H’s 149th annual set of performances on December 4 and 6 at 7:30 p.m. and December 7 and 8 at 3 p.m. All concerts will be at Symphony Hall; call (617) 266-3605.
