Viola Concerto (Bartók)

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Béla Bartók wrote his Viola Concerto (BB128) in July-August 1945, in Saranac Lake, New York, while suffering from the terminal stages of leukemia. It was a response to a commission by William Primrose. Along with the Piano Concerto No. 3, it is his last work, and he left it incomplete at his death.

The concerto was premiered on December 2, 1949 in Minneapolis, with Antal Doráti conducting, and William Primrose playing the solo part.

The work has been completed three times, once by Tibor Serly (1950); once by Peter Bartók (son of composer), Paul Neubauer, and Nelson Dellamaggiore (1995); and once by Csaba Erdelyi (due to copyright laws, the Erdelyi version is only available in retail stores in New Zealand and over the internet). The score suggests three movements with interconnecting passages, somewhat in the character of a ritornello, and this is how the completed versions run; however, Bartók mentioned in a letter to Primrose that he intended the work to have four movements in all. Bartók did not complete either the instrumentation or even the final texture, and large passages are relatively devoid of detail. Stylistically, the work is similar to the piano concerto written at the same time: harmonically restrained, lucid, and with an elegiac quality which had always been a strong component of his music, but which intensified in his late years.

Naxos has released a CD recording (8.554183) containing both versions as a comparison.