Orchestra plays Bartok and Stravinsky

The works of Bela Bartok and Igor Stravinsky are often paired in chamber performances but rarely in orchestral concerts, perhaps because each requires considerable effort to produce on a large scale. So the Philadelphia Orchestra's performance of Bartok's Piano Concerto No. 2 by Israeli pianist Yefim Bronfman, and of Stravinsky's Petrushka, provided a rare chance to compare major works by these two 20th-Century masters.

As two of the most prominent and influential modern composers, Bartok and Stravinsky took music in important new directions— quite different from one another, yet bearing striking resemblances. Both have been characterized as embodying a "primitivist" style of pulsating rhythms, percussive repetition and driving, almost chaotic motifs and changes of direction. Although this kind of primitivism is evident in both pieces in this concert, it hardly characterizes all the work of either composer.

The shift in Stravinsky's compositions during his later years and some of Bartok's chamber works and études suggest that both composers had something else in mind: for Stravinsky, an anti-Romantic concept of orchestration; and for Bartok, an exploration of modal possibilities and new melodic and contrapuntal conceptions.

Relentlessly difficult

The Bartok concerto, relentlessly difficult for the pianist except for a lonely adagio section, pounded its message home fiercely, with occasional chorales of varying instrumentation that were hauntingly beautiful. The orchestration was rich and fertile, a reflection of the Romantic era, yet embodying aspects of Prokofiev and Hindemith.

The melody and counterpoint, however, was pure Bartok, a result of his particular way of relating to the folk music that he meticulously collected early in his career as one of the founders of ethnomusicology. What Bartok heard and used were not so much the melodic notes as the sounds, utterances, inflections and emphases in singers' voices. He transformed these into modal structures that changed the face of modern music.

In this particular concerto, as in other Bartok works, an inner beauty can be heard within the distraught modernity. Listeners either hear that inner sound or they don't, so that while Bartok lovers are legion, many music lovers find his music unlistenable. In the chorale sections, however, the richness and beauty, as well as the transpositions of Hungarian folk themes, were impossible to miss.

Playful Stravinsky

In Petrushka, Stravinsky used Russian folk themes, a tendency from which he later dissociated himself. Unlike Bartok, in Petrushka the thematic material is melodious and close to the folk music that Stravinsky heard in Russia. The primitive rhythms were as intense and driving as that of the Bartok concerto but, as a ballet piece, more playful, also reflecting the puppetry story that the composition made famous.

Petrushka's use of solo instruments— especially the flute, piano and brass— was novel for its time and remains stunning today. What set the Stravinsky far apart from the Bartok was not only the different use of folk themes, but also the orchestration: Where Stravinsky's represents a rebellion against romantic and impressionist lushness, Bartok's incorporates the richness of romanticism into a new approach to melody and counterpoint. Stravinsky's choice of a puppet story couldn't have been a better method of introducing his new, sparse style, which presaged some of the technological mechanism ideas that infiltrated music in Paris in the 1920s.

Both Stravinsky and Bartok were great, innovative composers. Their influence is felt in all of today's music, notably in the jazz innovations of giants like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Gil Evans.

Like Bernstein

In Friday's concert, the differences between the two composers stood out as strongly as the resemblances. These massive and difficult pieces were well executed by the orchestra under the Hungarian conductor Gilbert Varga, whose style resembled Leonard Bernstein's choreographed approach, especially in those well-chosen moments when Varga let the orchestra play on without beating time, a Bernstein trademark.

Yefim Bronfman, truly one of the great concert pianists of this or any other time, gave a bravura performance of the Bartok concerto, a work that's more challenging than even the notorious Rachmaninoff Third Concerto (the so-called Rach 3 featured in the movie Shine).

Varga opened the program with Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, a tone poem depiction of parts of Scotland, which presaged the dramatic intensity and considerably different use of folk themes in Bartok and Stravinsky.