Strauss & Bartok: Violin Concertos

Violinist Alena Baeva, Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen pair two early concertos that show the young Richard Strauss and Béla Bartók finding their voices. Strauss wrote his only Violin Concerto at 18. It has a grand, operatic solo entrance that anticipates Ein Heldenleben, playful dotted rhythms and noble octave melodies, and it is technically far tougher than the Bruch concerto a critic once predicted it would replace. Bartók heard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra in Budapest in 1902 and called the experience “shattering.” His Violin Concerto No. 1 grew from that influence, and its opening “Stefi theme” (D–F♯–A–C♯) became a love letter to violinist Stefi Geyer, who never performed it. The concerto was found among her belongings 50 years later and marks a missing link between Bartók’s post-Wagnerian chromaticism and his raw, folk-inflected mature style.

The program closes with Bartók’s Rhapsody No. 1, built on Hungarian and Transylvanian folk melodies he collected in the field, in the orchestral version that adds cimbalom. Baeva chose the original of Bartók’s two published endings, a spiralling, minimalist whirl that collapses before the opening tune returns. The Rhapsody was recorded in the Glocke in Bremen, where Bartók himself played his First Piano Concerto 96 years earlier.

Alena Baeva, violin
Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen
Paavo Järvi, conductor
Sarah Christian, concertmaster (Strauss)
Antti Tikkanen, concertmaster (Bartók)
Hans-Kristian Kjos Sørensen, cimbalom (Bartók)