New York Philharmonic Performs Bartók at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Wednesday, 07 May 2025 13:22

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Brandon Patoc

At Lincoln Center’s excellent David Geffen Hall on the night of Saturday, April 26th, I had the exceptional pleasure to attend a marvelous concert featuring the New York Philharmonic under the brilliant direction of the extraordinary Iván Fischer, the founder and leader of the amazing Budapest Festival Orchestra and one of the greatest living conductors.

The event started appealingly with an effective rendition of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s popular Overture from his magnificent opera, The Magic Flute. In useful notes for the program, James M. Keller—who is the “former New York Philharmonic Program Annotator; San Francisco Symphony program annotator; and author of Chamber Music: A Listener's Guide,” published by Oxford University Press—comments about Mozart and the piece as follows:

He finished almost all of Die Zauberflöte during the spring and early summer of 1791, but several numbers (including the Overture) remained to be written when, in July, he was invited to compose an opera, to Metastasio's already much-used libretto La clemenza di Tito, for the festivities surrounding the coronation in Prague of Emperor Leopold II as King of Bohemia.

A solemn Adagio introduction precedes an ebullient, “fugal Allegro, the theme of which seems to have been borrowed (consciously or not) from a piano sonata by Muzio Clementi,” according to Keller; this is interrupted by another serious passage before a mostly exhilarating, concluding section.

The splendid soloist, Lisa Batiashvili—who looked lovely in a beautiful, bright yellow gown—then joined the musicians for a terrific performance of Mozart’s superb Violin Concerto in A Major, K. 219, the “Turkish,” from 1775. The initial, Allegro aperto movement begins charmingly, after which the solo violin enters lyrically. For all its gracefulness, the movement at moments attains an intensity that anticipates that of Ludwig van Beethoven; it closes somewhat abruptly, but affirmatively. (The notes explain that “Mozart did not provide cadenzas for this concerto” and that in this movement, the soloist “played a cadenza written by Tsotne Zedginidze, a 15-year-old composer/pianist from Georgia who is a participant in the Lisa Batiashvili Foundation.”)

The ensuing Adagio is more playful than usual for a slow movement by Mozart, but it too features aria-like passages for the soloist and plumbs greater emotional depths as it unfolds; it closes elegantly. The enchanting Rondeau finale, marked Tempo di Menuetto—is appropriately dance-like, with numerous dynamic episodes, and is often sparkling but also has more profound currents; it ends gently, if suddenly. (In this movement, the soloist played a cadenza that she composed.)

The second half of the evening was at least equally as strong and as memorable: a sterling account of Béla Bartók’s outstanding ballet score, The Wooden Prince: A Dancing-Play in One Act, to a Libretto by Béla Balázs, Op. 13. Keller records that:

Among the considerable output of Béla Bartók we find only three works for the stage: the opera Bluebeard's Castle (1911, revised through 1918), the ballet The Wooden Prince (1914–16, orchestrated in 1917), and the pantomime The Miraculous Mandarin (1918–19, orchestrated in 1924). 

He adds:

The Budapest Opera had approached Bartók in March 1913 about writing a ballet that they might consider producing, but it wasn't until the following year that the composer, who was in the backcountry collecting folk songs just then, began work on The Wooden Prince, which he started in April 1914 and then set aside for another two years. In April 1916 his Two Portraits for Orchestra (Op. 15, from 1907–08) received a belated premiere, and the excellent performance on that occasion catapulted him back into working mode. Within a few months The Wooden Prince was substantially completed, and by January 1917 it was fully orchestrated — very fully indeed, we might say, given the size of the orchestra employed.

He goes on to describe the scenario:

In Bartók's work a Prince, wandering in a forest, spies a Princess, who has just been confined to her castle by the Fairy of Nature. Unable to reach her, the Prince carves a puppet from his wooden staff and thrusts it high into the air, trying to attract the Princess's attention. He adorns it with his robe, then his crown, but only when he cuts off his curly hair and affixes it to the puppet does the Princess show interest. She leaves her castle but lavishes all her attention on the “wooden prince” rather than the real one, who stands by in abject frustration. The Fairy, who is monitoring all of this, causes the puppet to dance about, to the Princess's delight. Eventually, the Fairy takes pity on the lovelorn Prince and reverses the influences. Suddenly the Prince himself appeals to the Princess more, but Nature sees to it that she must also sacrifice something to achieve love, just as the Prince sacrificed his curly locks. She gives up her crown, and the Fairy elevates the couple into the realm of love. The dreamlike substance found in symbolism invites interpretation, and Balázs suggested one possibility:

The wooden puppet, which my prince makes in order to make his presence known to the princess, is an act of creation, embodying everything that an artist has to give, until it is perfectly and brilliantly lustrous, but leaving the artist himself empty and bereft. I was thinking here of the deep tragedy that artists frequently experience when an act of creation becomes a rival of the creator, and of the painful glory when a woman prefers the poem to the poet, the picture to the painter. 

Balázs, who authored the libretto for Bluebeard’s Castle, alsowrote a collection of fairytales praised by Thomas Mann as a “beautiful book,” as well as poetry, drama, an autobiographical novel, screenplays, film criticism and theory, and a work on the aesthetics of death.

As for the music, which resists summary, it is mysterious, evocative, haunting and sometimes ludic.

The artists deservedly received a standing ovation.

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