Béla Bartók - Violin Concerto No. 2 (1938)

Béla Viktor János Bartók (25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century; he and Franz Liszt are regarded as Hungary’s greatest composers (Gillies 2001). Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology. Please support my channel: Violin Concerto No. 2 (1937-38) Dedicated to Zoltán Székely 1. Allegro non troppo 2. Andante tranquillo 3. Allegro molto Isaac Stern, violin and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2, BB 117 was written in 1937–38. During the composer’s life, it was known simply as his Violin Concerto. (His other violin concerto, Violin Concerto No. 1, Sz. 36, BB 48a was written in the years 1907–1908, but only published in 1956, after the composer’s death, as “Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. posth.“) Bartók composed the concerto in a difficult stage of his life, when he was filled with serious concerns about the growing strength of fascism. He was of firm anti-fascist opinions, and therefore became the target of various attacks in pre-war Hungary. Bartók initially planned to write a single-movement concerto set of variations, but Zoltán Székely wanted a standard three-movement concerto. In the end, Székely received his three movements, while Bartók received his variations (the second movement being possibly the most formal set of variations Bartók wrote in his career, and the third movement being a variation on material from the first). Though not employing twelve-tone technique the piece contains twelve-tone themes.