Barlok's Stepchild

Hungary's late great Composer Bela Bartok used to refer fondly to his First Piano Concerto as his "stepchild." Critics have often used harsher terms. "Unmitigated ugliness," wrote the Nation at the work's U.S. premiere. That was in 1928, when the 46-year-old composer himself was at the piano and his old friend Fritz Reiner on the podium. Since then, the work has rarely been performed in Europe and never by a major U.S. orchestra. Last week it made a long overdue reappearance under the baton of Conductor Reiner, and this time the stepchild clearly strode with a giant's tread.

The piano soloist with Reiner's Chicago Symphony was Rudolf Serkin, who virtually alone among major pianists will attempt Bartok's fiendishly difficult work (at the premiere, recalls Reiner, Bartok himself made several mistakes). In preparation for the concerto, Reiner put his orchestra through five long rehearsals, three of them with Serkin.

An acrid, violent, percussive work, the concerto utilizes eerie chord clusters and precisely graduated effects of drums and cymbals ("Hit the snare at the rim and move gradually in towards the center," says the score at one point) to produce sounds as weird as anything in the world of electronic music. The first movement in last week's performance built to a climax with express-train power. The quieter second movement gained its effect from the almost somnolent alternation of the piano's sinuous theme with the whisper of a drum, the rasp of a snare, the tinkle of a triangle; the wildly fragmented third movement erupted in brief, craggy patterns stitched together only by the surgical precision of Reiner's conducting.

For both conductor and soloist, the performance was an act of devotion. Hungarian-born Fritz Reiner studied under Bartok at the Academy of Music in Budapest. Early in his career, Reiner started championing Bartok's works. "We were both from the same stable," he says, and adds in a rare burst of humility: "Of course, he was the great Bela Bartok, and I was only the little Fritz Reiner."

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