Bartók Concerto for Orchestra; Four Orchestral Pieces Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra/Karina Canellakis Pentatone PTC 5187 027 63:15 mins
This enticing and brilliantly engineered release, celebrating the debut recording partnership between the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and their chief conductor Karina Canellakis, opens in a particularly auspicious manner with a superbly committed account of Bartók’s unaccountably neglected Four Orchestral Pieces. Originally composed in 1912 and orchestrated nine years later, this stunning work inhabits the same darkly coloured soundworld as the opera Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and the ballet The Wooden Prince, although the second movement Scherzo’s aggressive writing foreshadows the slightly later ballet, The Miraculous Mandarin. Canellakis projects the slow ‘Preludio’, ‘Intermezzo’ and ‘Marcia Funebre’ movements with full-blooded passion, securing a wonderfully warm string tone from her orchestra, and unleashes tremendous energy and ferocity in the ‘Scherzo’.
Canellakis faces stern competition in the Concerto for Orchestra with classic benchmark accounts from the likes of Reiner, Solti, Iván Fischer and, most recently, Susanna Mälkki. The great virtue of this performance, however, is that Canellakis places more emphasis on the work’s shadowy and anguished resonances rather than focusing on its propensity towards extrovert virtuoso display. This aspect particularly comes to the fore in the carefully calibrated and atmospheric slow introduction to the first movement which manages to combine mystery and uneasy anticipation, and in the central ‘Elegia’, invested here with a profoundly affecting sense of impending tragedy. The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic delivers stunningly incisive playing in the moto perpetuo passagework of the ‘Finale’, and the wonderfully clear recording allows you to hear every subtle detail in Bartók’s fabulously imaginative orchestration. My only caveat with this performance is the somewhat rushed account of the ‘Game of Couples’ second movement which robs the music of some of its whimsy and bitingly satirical humour.
Erik Levi
