In today’s performance, we take a thorough look at Bartók’s Kossuth Symphony, about which Gábor Hollerung once said,
“Bartók’s juvenile work, written in the early 1900s, before Bartók had become acquainted with Hungarian folk music. The choice of subject matter is also romantic, displaying a kind of national commitment. Its orchestration and musical thinking still show the influence of Brahms and Richard Strauss. The structure of the piece is similar to programme music, in which each of the characters in the story are represented by a theme. In our case, Kossuth is symbolised by a verbunk-like music, while the opponents are represented by a distorted version of the imperial anthem written by Haydn. And although the composer did not give it an opus number – and so it is rarely played out of reverence for him – I have to say that it is one of the most brilliant works of Hungarian national romanticism, in the line of Liszt, Erkel, Mosonyi and Goldmark.”
