Bartok's Viola Concerto to have 'second premiere' in Auckland

By HEATH LEES

A world premiere is a rare event in Auckland. On Thursday the Auckland Philharmonia with Hungarian-born violist Csaba Erdelyi as soloist will perform a piece by the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, one of the most famous 20th-century names in European music.

What makes the occasion a startling one, as Aucklanders with long memories will realise, is that nearly 10 years ago there was another world premiere performance of the same viola concerto, with the solo part played by New Zealander Donald Maurice.

How is it that two world premieres of the same work can happen, both in Auckland, by two different soloists a decade apart? Part of the answer lies in the bizarre fact that Bartok's Viola Concerto doesn't really exist.

At least not in the strictest sense, since Bartok didn't complete the work before his death in September 1945, but left a scrappy manuscript of about a dozen large pages with many corrections, shorthand messages and some "floating" musical jottings that lack a clear home within the work.

Trying to reconstruct Bartok's composition from the written evidence has been one of classical music's most intricate detective stories of the past 50 years, and reveals a troubled plot of competing versions, heated exchanges, closed-door, "underground" performances and legal battles.

The reason for such lack of harmony among musicians is that the concerto's "official" version, completed in the late 1940s by violist Tibor Serly at the request of the composer's son Peter Bartok, lacks conviction, and in some places even seems to contradict Bartok's practice.

Fifteen years ago, New Zealand violist Donald Maurice got hold of a copy of Bartok's manuscript, and by 1992 had completed a new performing version, which he was invited to introduce to the World Viola Congress in Chicago that year. The congress organisers requested a videotape of a performance so Maurice, who was on the staff of Auckland University's School of Music at the time, gave the world premiere in Auckland of his version of the Viola Concerto at a Graduation Concert in May that year, with the University Orchestra under the baton of Uwe Grodd.

History will be repeating itself to some degree during Thursday's concert since by a strange coincidence, the viola soloist, Erdelyi, a composer and musicologist as well as a performer, has just completed many years of painstaking labour in reconstructing his own version of Bartok's unfinished concerto.

As luck would have it, Erdelyi was due to visit New Zealand for the 29th International Viola Congress in Wellington next week, and when the Auckland Philharmonia's programme planners heard of this, they quickly arranged to have Erdelyi re-routed through Auckland, thus offering him the first public platform for the new version of Bartok's concerto.

In a story that has had its fair share of fights and broken relationships amongst musicians, it's a pleasure to report that both Maurice and Erdelyi have worked in contact with each other and along similar lines for many years now.

Maurice states modestly that his major contribution was to "clean up the viola part." Erdelyi claims an intimate knowledge of Bartok's music since the time of his Hungarian childhood. He says that his continuous discussions with Bartok experts the world over, and his years of study into how Bartok used the orchestra, have paid off with a score that aims to rediscover the sound and texture that Bartok had in mind.

To illustrate, Erdelyi points especially to a Scherzo section between the second and third movements. "Bartok indicated that the music played here by the solo viola has to be repeated by the full orchestra. In Serly's version this simply does not exist. In Peter Bartok's latest authorised version [published in 1995] it does appear in part, but nearly half the material is missing, and I feel that the instruments used are not as Bartok would have chosen. In my version you will hear for the first time Bartok's last, unearthed "Concerto for Orchestra."

Erdelyi is passionately eloquent about the Viola Concerto, which he sees as a very special work from a composer who knew he was dying. "The musical content is different from anything else Bartok wrote. Sensing his impending departure, he saw himself standing in the gateway between life on Earth and the other side, and he wrote a strongly autobiographical message, sharing with us the suffering of his hour, his yearning to be healed by pure nature, his outpouring of love in music, and the dance of continuing life that engulfs all single individuals."

If even half the passion and poetry that Erdelyi expresses in words comes across in the performance, this could be a very memorable concert.