Performance practice and philology in Bartók’s Violin Concerto (1938)

Abstract

The world premiere recording of Bartók’s Violin Concerto, played by Zoltán Székely has been a classic for seventy-two years now. Since that time, dozens of artists have committed the work to disc and hundreds more—from concert artists to conservatory students—have played the Concerto. Székely’s extremely subtle, almost chamber-music-like interpretation has been widely admired but many violinists in past decades have favored, by and large, a more robust approach, one that stresses the work’s connections to the Romantic concerto tradition. The question is: can a careful reading of the musical text—the final version as well as the various manuscript sources—help a player make practical stylistic decisions? A comparative examination of the performance of the first 16 measures from a number of older and more recent recordings will be set against what textual analysis can tell us, as a test case for a productive dialog between scholarship and performance.