Bartók
The Miraculous Mandarin & Concerto for Orchestra
WDR Sinfonieorchester/Cristian Mǎcelaru
Linn Records CKD806 70:55 mins
Bartók based The Miraculous Mandarin on a ‘pantomime grotesque’ by Melchior Lengyel, whose writings also inspired three of Ernst Lubitsch’s films.
Writing to his publishers in 1927, Bartók described the Mandarin as the best orchestral work he had so far written, but for many years the seedy nature of its scenario, in which a prostitute lures men up to her den so that her accomplices can rob them, militated against stage productions.
So, too, did the extreme modernist nature of Bartók’s music, whose opening depiction of the busy street of a metropolis he once called ‘an awful clamour, clatter, stampeding and blowing of horns’. It’s an altogether exhilarating score whose breathless energy lets up only for three languorous and seductive dances; and it’s appropriate that we should hear it played here – and superbly so – by the WDR Symphony Orchestra, in whose home city of Cologne the work was premiered in 1926.
By the time he came to compose his Concerto for Orchestra in 1943, Bartók’s style had mellowed considerably, and yet every note still bears the stamp of his personality – unless it be the famous parody of Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ Symphony that so rudely interrupts the otherwise gentle Intermezzo fourth movement. Bartók wrote the concerto in New York during his exile from fascist Hungary, and he designed it to throw the spotlight onto various members of Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Again, the WDR players rise to the occasion quite brilliantly, with Cristian Mặcelaru conducting a performance of complete authority.
