Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta

In 1936 Bartók completed a new work for the 10th anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, commissioned by the orchestra’s founder and conductor, Paul Sacher. Bartók had become increasingly interested in the music of the 18th-century Baroque period, and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta skillfully filters Baroque genres and technical methods through his own modernist idiom, itself derived from the taut melodic phrases and driving dance rhythms of Hungarian folk music. The work is structured in two pairs of alternating slow and fast movements. The instrumental layout described in the title is a radical development of the Baroque concerto grosso, with its contrasting groups of solo and ensemble strings. Bartók here deploys the strings in two antiphonally placed chamber orchestras, with an additional group of instruments located between them consisting of percussion, harp (a stringed instrument of a different kind), piano (both stringed and percussive) and celesta, whose keyboard operates a range of chiming metal bars. The first movement is a slow and intense fugue on a chromatic theme, mainly for strings alone, with the celesta adding a shimmering background in the closing stages. The quick second movement, a cascade of virtuoso rhythmic invention, is followed by the slow third, with its interplay between a folk-like melody (introduced by the violas) and atmospheric percussion sounds. Then comes the finale, based on its speedy dance-like opening theme and passing through multiple contrasting episodes to reach a brilliant conclusion.