Bartók, Kodály, Janáček: Concertos for Orchestra – Decca

Eloquence keeps mining the Decca vaults, and this time the ore is a curious amalgam: three composers who never quite belonged to the same country, let alone the same aesthetic camp, yet who somehow make sense stacked side by side on a single disc. The packaging calls it a Mehta anthology. Don’t believe everything you read on a sleeve; the man conducts less than half of it. But provenance quibbles aside, there’s real substance here.

Start with the piece nobody plays enough, the Kodály. His Concerto for Orchestra gets dismissed sometimes as the lesser cousin to the Bartók it superficially resembles, both born of American commissions, both trading on the old Baroque concerto grosso idea of spotlighting sections of the band in turn. But Kodály’s imagination runs warmer, more pastoral, than that comparison suggests. There’s sunlight in this music, and a kind of unforced generosity. You can hear the cimbalom-tinged folk inflections poking through even when the surface language is fully orchestral, fully cosmopolitan. Dorati recorded this in Vienna in 1974 as part of his complete Kodály orchestral cycle, and gets an honest, glowing response from what was essentially an expatriate Hungarian band operating far from home. Nobody would call the playing electric. The strings occasionally sound as though they’d rather be finishing off a Haydn symphony, which, in fact, they’d just done. But there’s real affection in the phrasing, a sense of the music being loved rather than merely dispatched. Given how few rivals exist on disc, that counts for something.

The Bartók, of course, everyone knows, or thinks they do. Mehta’s 1975 Israel Philharmonic account is a different animal from the granitic, structurally severe readings we associate with Reiner or Solti. This is Bartók with the collar loosened. The winds get pushed forward in the mix, almost indecently so at times; those “Giuoco delle coppie” duets arrive with a kind of theatrical spotlighting, each pair of instruments taking a bow before slipping back into the texture. Purists will mutter. I found myself charmed more often than not, particularly by the sheer personality of the playing; this was a great orchestra in that decade, full of soloists who’d clearly earned their principal chairs the hard way, in Budapest or Bucharest or wherever they’d trained before emigrating. The finale, though, sprawls a little under Mehta’s watch. The fugal writing loses some of its bite, the architecture goes slightly soft-focus. Not fatal. Just noticeable if you know the score’s bones as well as its flesh.

And then Janáček, the odd man out biographically, though not really musically, since his harmonic thinking was every bit as radical in its unpretentious way as anything the two Hungarians produced. Taras Bulba, the rhapsody after Gogol, is bloody stuff on paper: Cossack heroism, torture, martyrdom. But Janáček’s treatment is stranger than the subject demands, fractured, incantatory, full of those speech-rhythm melodic cells he mined from Moravian dialect. This reading leans toward the contemplative end of interpretive possibility. The “Death of Andrij” movement in particular unfolds with an almost liturgical hush, organ tones glowing underneath rather than blazing. Those wanting the visceral, hair-raising Janáček, the composer as unhinged prophet, should seek out Ančerl’s Czech Philharmonic account, or Serebrier’s underrated version for Reference Recordings, which for my money remains the most purely exciting Taras Bulba on disc, criminally under-known. This version won’t replace either. But it offers something different: patience, spiritual weight, a sense of ritual rather than violence.

David Hurwitz’s notes are, characteristically, more fun to read than most liner essays: long on personality, short on the dry documentary facts a completist might want (premiere dates, venues, that sort of thing). Fair trade, mostly.

Taken as a whole this is a disc of gaps filled rather than repertoire redefined. No single performance here unseats the classic references, but the Kodály alone justifies a look, since decent recordings of that score remain stubbornly scarce. Worth owning for curiosity’s sake, and for the Kodály’s sheer rarity value. Not, in the end, a first choice for either the Bartók or the Janáček.