Viola Concerto, op.posth., BB 128 (Serly version)

DURATION 21 minutes

Year Of Composition 1945

The famous Scottish violist William Primrose commissioned Bartók’s Viola Concerto in 1945. At first the composer was unsure of his ability to write a work for the viola; he felt he didn’t understand the instrument’s capabilities and limits. After hearing Primrose perform William Walton’s Viola Concerto he reconsidered and began listening to other viola concertos, specifically the most famous of all, Berlioz’s Harold in Italy. Feeling confident he could complete the commission, he finally accepted Primrose’s offer. Time, however, was not on his side – he would die before its completion.

THE WORLD IN 1945...

World War Two ends, and the United Nations is formed alongside the International Court of Justice and World Bank, as the world’s governments strive for a spirit of international cooperation.

Tibor Serly was a composer and orchestral violist who held positions with the Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and NBC Orchestras. He first met Bartók in Budapest when Serly was a student of Zoltán Kodály. When Bartók fled to the United States in 1940, he and Serly became friends. A violist and champion of the composer, Serly was the perfect choice to complete Bartók’s Viola Concerto.

After Bartók’s death, Serly completed the orchestration of the last few bars of the Piano Concerto No.3 and set to work on the Viola Concerto. Serly was fortunate to have some of the orchestration questions answered for him by Bartók himself. In a letter to Primrose, Bartók wrote, “The orchestration will be rather transparent, more transparent than in the Violin Concerto…’. In the interim, Primrose had lost hope of ever getting his commission. That is until in 1949 when he heard a rumour that the concerto was being reworked for cello. It was only then that he learned Serly had completed the concerto. He collected his commission and premiered the work in 1949 with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra.

The Viola Concerto is filled with chromaticism, traditional church modes, whole-tone and octatonic sections, various pitch collections and folk tunes. The first movement is in sonata form and begins with the viola playing in a soloistic manner, accompanied only by soft pizzicato cellos. The transition between the first and second movement is effortlessly handled by an interlude played by the principal bassoon, who then hands the spotlight over to the soloist. The transition to the third movement is handled by the solo viola, which leads into a rondo whose principal thematic material is a Scottish folk tune, perhaps a nod to the familial roots of William Primrose.

In 1970 William Primrose commented on the wisdom of his commission:

‘When I commissioned the concerto, most people thought I had made a big mistake, including people in my manager’s office. Who on earth was going to ask me to play a concerto by Béla Bartók? I paid him what he asked—$1,000—and I played the concerto well over a hundred times for fairly respectable fees. So, it was almost like getting in on the ground floor in investing in Xerox or the Polaroid camera.’

Edited by Jack Johnson (© New Mexico Philharmonic)

Further Listening

Jennifer Higdon – Viola Concerto Winner of the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

John Woolrich – Ulysses Awakes

A haunting solo viola leads a small string ensemble in a creative transcription of the first aria from Monteverdi’s ‘Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria’

Maurice