Bartók - Concerto for Orchestra etc

The Guardian 100

James Ehnes (violin), Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Gardner
(Chandos)

Anyone who heard the Bergen Philharmonic with its chief conductor Edward Gardner at this year’s Edinburgh international festival will pounce on this latest CD collaboration: a fierce, lucid account of Bartók’s last great masterpiece, Concerto for Orchestra (1943/5), which he wrote in exile in America. As ever with Bartók, the folk element is strongly present, here and throughout, in the Dance Suite (1923) and in the Rhapsodies Nos 1 and 2 (note the gorgeous, twanging cimabalom), with the ever persuasive Canadian violinist James Ehnes as soloist, full of Hungarian-Romanian zest. The Bergen orchestra sounds wonderfully alive to Bartók’s rhythmic exactitudes.