Béla BARTÓK (1881-1945)
Violin Concerto No. 2, Sz. 112 (1938) [35:33]
Péter Szervánszky (violin)
Metropolitan Orchestra (Budapest)/János Ferencsik
rec. live 5 January 1944, Vigadó Concert Hall, Budapest
BMC CD253 [35:33]
Bartók’s Violin Concerto No.2 was premiered by its commissioner Zoltán Székely in Amsterdam on 23 March 1939, with Mengelberg conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra. A recording has fortunately survived and is well-known. The violinist kept exclusive rights to performance for nearly two years and by the time the rights had elapsed the world – or most of it - had been plunged into war. The score had been published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1941 but it was clearly impossible for someone in Budapest to acquire it and it took a copyist in the city to work on the parts for a projected performance by Péter Szervánszky. At this point the violinist was conscripted and it wasn’t until over two years later that he was released from army service to give the Hungarian premiere with János Ferencsik.
It was a perceptive choice of soloist as he had been second violinist in the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet, later taking the same position in the even more renowned Hungarian String Quartet, led by Sandor Végh, a position he held for a couple of years. During this time he had visited Bartók to play through the Duos for two violins with a colleague and later he was to promote the violin sonatas, the solo sonata and the Two Portraits.
I would like to say that this is a major addition to the Bartók discography and whilst in some ways it is – Székely was himself to lead the Hungarian Quartet and there is a core musical tradition at work here – the problem is entirely in the nature of the recording. If you know Louis Krasner’s recording of the Berg Concerto with Webern conducting the BBC Symphony in 1936 – to take an example of a historically priceless document – you need to be warned that the restored sound of Krasner’s acetates is a million times better than the sound of this Bartók performance. It was recorded not on tape or acetates but on X-ray plates via Radio Budapest, at the instruction of an avid admirer of the composer who ensured that everything Bartókian was recorded. If you have Hungaroton’s Recordings from Private Collections box set devoted to the composer’s historical recordings you will know of the treasures of the Babits-Makai collection. The Violin Concerto however doesn’t feature there, I suspect because of the very poor sound quality.
The good thing about the sound is that Szervánszky’s violin is forwardly balanced. The bad news is that for large swathes of the work the orchestral sound is submerged in a coating of aural mush. One can’t hear much detail; even the winds don’t sound and though the orchestral pizzicati do come over, there is such a blizzard of noise that one can’t reasonably hope to draw much from the way Ferencsik directs though it’s clear, in outline, that he is strongly attuned throughout. Szervánszky is stylistically and technically powerful, with a tight tone and it’s a pity the recording distorts his double stops, and turns into pummeling walls of sound in fortissimos, as his control of mood and colour are, one can intuit, excellent. He is also fully up to most subsequent soloists’s tempos, though it’s true that after the war players such as Ivry Gitlis, with Horenstein, drove through the slow movement much faster, not necessarily to the work’s benefit. The way Szervánszky negotiates the first movement cadenza and inflects the opening of the slow movement with deft folkloric insinuations shows a real Bartók interpreter at the helm, however, and his metrical flexibility in the finale is notable. A small amount of applause is retained after the torrid sound of the work’s conclusion.
Note a small slip-up in the track listing timing information: the outer movements’ timings should be reversed. It’s the opening movement that lasts 14:39, not the finale.
I admire the bravery of BMC in releasing this 35-minute disc. It marks a historic event in Budapest and the documentation contextualizes that well, in Hungarian and English translation, but in truth this is for the seriously hardened violin collector and only the toughest of the tough should consider listening.
Jonathan Woolf
