Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, ‘the ultimate orchestral piece,’ to be played by New Jersey Symphony

From left, New Jersey Symphony musicians Jonathan Spitz, Robert Wagner and Gregory LaRosa.

Ask a musician about Béla Bartók and you will find that his reputation is high, and that his music is deeply felt. The modern Hungarian composer was a firebrand of orchestration and technique.

Ask a listener and it is a different story. His music is difficult to categorize in style, substance and structure. “There are certain names of composers that can scare some audiences and Bartók can be a little bit scary because there is an austere and sometimes abstract quality in his music,” says Jonathan Spitz, principal cello of the New Jersey Symphony.

The title piece of the Symphony’s “Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra” program — which will be performed in Newark, Princeton, Red Bank and New Brunswick from March 12 to March 15 — is designed to show off the musicians’ mettle. They love playing it because Bartók treated almost all the symphonic sections to virtuosic solos that demand great technique.

“In the Concerto, Bartók gives you a lot of details and information about how he’s expecting you are going to approach this,” says Robert Wagner, New Jersey Symphony’s principal bassoon. “He really wanted to feature all of the instruments in a way that was challenging to us and to himself.”

“The Concerto is deeply Hungarian in its uses of rhythm and the melodic elements,” says Spitz. “And with that is this wonderful modernism and brilliant compositional technique and, of course, Bartók’s use of the orchestra.”

Markus Stenz will substitute for conductor Ruth Reinhardt, who canceled on doctors’ orders; she is pregnant with her first child. Stenz recently led the “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony” concerts with the Symphony, from Feb. 26 to March 1.

CHRIS LEE

ALBERT CANO SMIT

Soloist Eva Gevorgyan also cancelled her appearance due to visa processing delays. In her place will be Albert Cano Smit for Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2.

The program will include Louise Dumont Farrenc’s Overture No. 1 in E Minor (not, as originally scheduled, Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances), which Stenz recently performed in a program with The Colorado Symphony.

With the change in repertoire, the concert will no longer explore Bartók’s evolution in style from his earlier Hungarian folk music quality to his later modern classicism. Instead it will showcase the musicians in a variety of orchestral roles, ranging from a full orchestra (Farrenc) to a supporting role (Chopin) to virtuoso soloists (Bartók).

Thankfully Bartók’s Concerto made the cut. It has been a long time coming. At the 2025-26 season announcement, music director Xian Zhang said that they had been trying to fit it into programming for eight years or so and called it “the ultimate orchestral piece. I think the orchestra will enjoy it very much. It’s one of the pieces they’ll have the most fun with.”

“When I saw it on the program, I was so excited because I haven’t played it in many years, and I can’t wait to be in that world again,” says Spitz. He doesn’t have a solo, but the cello and basses open the piece with a profound tremolo that sets the tone.

Wagner, who has been principal bassoon since 1979, gets the honor of kicking off the amusing second movement (“Giuoco delle coppie”) with a jaunty duet, played with Mark Timmerman on bassoon II. The bassoon solo is followed by short sections of duets and trios that travel through the oboes, clarinets, flutes, muted trumpets and brass.

BÉLA BARTÓK

Wagner says that stacked up to other composers who wrote for the bassoon, Bartók fits right down the middle. “Beethoven and Mozart just loved the bassoon: They gave us a lot to do a lot of the time. Bruckner had no use for us whatsoever. It’s like we might as well be the 10th, 11th and 12th horn players: No solo writing, no doubling, no string lines – nothing for us!” he jokes.

Timpani gets one of the most elaborate solos. “For timpanists, the work holds a special place of exploring the instrument in a way that perhaps had been done before but was not particularly mainstream at the time,” says Gregory LaRosa, principal timpani since 2019.

He has played works by Bartók on tour in Hungary as guest principal timpanist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. “The timpani part (in the Concerto) is particularly interesting because it is as much rhythmic as it is harmonic,” he says. “In the fourth movement (‘Intermezzo interrotto’) I play 16 notes in the entire movement and it is all in a baseline passage underneath a viola solo in the middle. And in those 16 notes, I’m playing around 12 or 13 different pitches. It is fascinating because there’s no gimmicks and it just lets the drum do what it can do.”

He says it is unusual to have such a quick succession of pitches because for most of the timpani’s history, it was a singularly pitched instrument. “Its roots are from on horseback in wartime and you weren’t really concerned about pitch at that point.” It wasn’t until the later symphonies of Joseph Haydn in the 1790s that composers began experimenting with changing the timpani’s pitch within a piece.

GREGORY LaROSA

“The reason was because with the mechanism of the drum, there was no easy way to tune quickly within a piece,” LaRosa says. “You would have to tune each lug of the drum with your hands, and so it was sort of an impossible task. Then around the mid-1800s, the drum evolved into having a foot mechanism, and in the 1900s, the timpani really started to flourish as this harmonic instrument. I think Strauss was probably the first composer to really explore it and Bartók was on his heels.”

Another novelty is how the timpani carries the harmony with the viola. “I think this piece is a really amazing exploration of color, and to allow the timpani’s timbre to do something like this — rather than just having another instrument you might typically hear like the harp or the bass — just adds a different dimension of color to the music.”

Other thrilling timpani techniques occur in the Finale with a chromatic descending scale and a glissando.

“I like to call it a ‘problem-solving piece’ because there are so many logistical things you have to consider before you can even think about how to make the music happen,” LaRosa says. “For that reason, you can almost guarantee it is going to be asked (for) in auditions, because in a very short amount of time you have to demonstrate the timpani’s ability to just play tunes.”

Bassoons use it for auditioning, too. “This is very standard stuff,” says Wagner, who teaches at Princeton University. “When I’m auditioning second bassoon players, we usually play through this as one of the pieces: Matching sound, inflection, articulations, etc. All that kind of stuff is very important to see if each candidate is paying attention to all the details.”

For listeners, there is fun musical lore to look out for. “I had a professor at Juilliard who did a little talk about it,” Wagner says, “and he said if you look closely enough, you can find Wagner’s ‘Parsifal,’ Beethoven’s Ninth, Shostakovich’s Seventh, Franz Lehár’s ‘The Merry Widow’ and all kinds of things in these tiny little snippets. Whether Bartók intended to do so or not is up for debate, but it’s still fun to know about.”

There is also lore attached to the work’s genesis, which was commissioned in 1943 by Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Bartók had left Hungary for America in 1940 under the growing threat of Nazi Germany, and was living in New York at the time.

His New York chapter was difficult. He was chronically ill and struggled to make ends meet, eventually dying of leukemia in 1945. He wrote the Concerto at Saranac Lake, where he spent the last three summers of his life. He was afraid his illness might make it impossible for him to complete the work: There is the mood of a man contemplating his own death.

ROB DAVIDSON

JONATHAN SPITZ

“In terms of its emotional span, it has this deeply human feeling,” says Spitz. “It is so deeply sad and we can only put our own kind of ideas on that, whether it is his nostalgia for his homeland or his feelings of his own mortality. There is a folk and nature element in the third movement with night music that depicts the summer evening sounds in his native Hungary, and then there is that ending with this incredible sense of victory.”

The mood painting is ultimately up to the conductor, but Spitz says “If you play the piece and give a good performance, it’s not hidden. You don’t have to work harder to have those qualities: It’s just there. For audiences, yes, there is some dissonance. It is not atonal, but the tonality is not necessarily easy harmonies to grasp. But without needing to be terribly theoretical or knowledgeable about the music, I think if a person listens to it with an open heart, that quality comes through.”

Spitz has been principal cello since 1991. He joined the section in 1984, then resigned for some years to pursue chamber music opportunities, including Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. During his time with Orpheus, Bartók’s Folk Dances was their go-to encore and he estimates he played it more than 60 times.

He is the head of the string program at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and professor of cello, and teaches privately. “I love passing along what I was given but also what I’ve learned, and I really try to bring a humanistic approach to teaching,” he says.

When he was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, some of his chamber music coaches knew Bartók personally “so the feeling for me is kind of direct,” he says. “It’s not just a monumental work written by a statue of a composer on a pedestal, but by a man who lived and suffered, and that feeling is very important to me as a musician: that you’re playing a human creation, not just a purely musical one.”

ROBERT WAGNER

For Wagner there is also a directness of feeling and reverence. In 1988, he was living in Newport in Jersey City with his husband, who is also a bassoon player. They had heard on the news that Bartók, who died in 1945 at age 64, was to be exhumed from his grave in Hartsdale, New York, at the request of his sons. The coffin was to brought to England by the Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean line, then travel with a motorcade across Europe to Hungary, where Bartók would be reburied in the family tomb in Budapest.

Wagner remembers the day well: June 25. “We lived on the 20th floor so we had a perfect view of the entire Manhattan island and knew we could watch it from our windows,” he says. “We just thought, ‘Okay, we have to do this: We will send him out of New York Harbor with some of his own music.’ We could see the QE2, and we watched it backing out so we knew when to get ready to play.”

What did they play? The bassoon duet from the second movement of the Concerto, of course.

The concerts will take place at Prudential Hall at NJPAC in Newark, March 12 at 1:30 p.m.; The Richardson Auditorium at Princeton University, March 13 at 7:30 p.m.; The Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, March 14 at 7:30 p.m.; and The State Theatre in New Brunswick, March 15 at 2 p.m. Visit njsymphony.org.

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