Piano Concerto No. 1 in A Major

When he completed the first of his three piano concertos in 1926, Bartók was already famous beyond his native Hungary, both as a leading 20th-century composer and as a concert pianist. He himself played the solo part of his Piano Concerto No. 1 at its first performance, in Frankfurt in 1927. Bartók’s idiom is here at its most dissonant, severe and uncompromising, with conventional melody banished. In its place is a process of construction using terse melodic fragments in an insistent, repetitive manner derived from the Central European folk music that Bartók collected and studied; the larger paragraphs built up in this way are propelled in the two fast outer movements by a forceful rhythmic drive. The work’s orchestration, too, subverts Romantic tradition: The wind and percussion sections dominate, while the strings are omitted altogether in the slow second movement. The cumulative result is powerful and strikingly individual, as if the music is composed in black and white rather than in colour.