Concerto for Orchestra / Dance Suite / Rhapsodies Nos 1 & 2

Four years after a highly successful Bartók recording with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner here returns to the composer on SACD, with James Ehnes as solo violinist, and his Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. The central piece in this recording is the Concerto for Orchestra, the largest work that Bartók completed during the last five years of his life and described by the composer, in the programme notes for its 1944 premiere, as 'a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one'.