Abstract
Hailed as a critical and popular success since its premiere in December 1944, Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra is most often discussed as the accessible masterpiece that helped launch a posthumous resurgence of the composer's earlier musical output. Yet the historical and aesthetic significance of this work in relation to American orchestral life—and Serge Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony Orchestra in particular—remains largely ignored. The Concerto for Orchestra can be viewed through the lens of what might be called “collective virtuosity”: a concept that describes the performance of a work whose challenging musical language requires a heightened level of artistic teamwork. Described through musical analysis and strengthened by archival research and management theory, this phenomenon reflects a multitude of historical and social developments that are particularly salient to the story surrounding Bartók's Concerto, thus serving as a useful analytic tool that reveals new insights concerning the work and its popular success in America.
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