Vintage Scherzo

From the first tranquil notes of the oboes, on through all the simple, light-hearted melodies of the Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra, the music was ingratiating, undemanding--and, somehow, startling. The audience kept turning to its program notes for reassurance that this really was a composition by Bela Bartok.

Only now and then, as Pianist Louis Kentner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra performed the Scherzo's British premiere last week, could Bartok fans find hints of the more familiar dissonances and pounding rhythms of the composer's later career. This was vintage stuff, dating back to Bartok's early romantic period. And after a long orchestral introduction, Kentner opened a floodgate of lush, big-fisted chords.

Bartok composed the Scherzo when he was 24, entranced by the windy sonorities of Richard Strauss, and he filled the work with rolling Straussian orchestrated sounds. But the scheduled 1905 premiere never took place. At the last moment, Bartok withdrew the Scherzo, because Hans Richter (who was to have led the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, with Bartok at the piano) had not had time to study and annotate the master score and there were many mistakes in copied parts. That same year, Bartok discovered folk music, and his infatuation with Strauss ended abruptly. There were no requests to revive his unplayed Scherzo, and Bartok set off down the long loud road of dissonance.

After his death, in 1945, the Scherzo was found among his papers by his son Bela in Budapest. Today, like all of Bartok's music, it is embroiled in a discordant legal hassle between his heirs and the Manhattan lawyer who is executor of the estate and who has given Pianist Kentner exclusive performance rights to the Scherzo for the next two years.

Though it may sound to some listeners as if it were written to accompany a film, London critics found the Scherzo worthwhile as a backward look into the early output of one of the great spirits of modern music. Said Colin Mason of the Guardian: "Although it is not likely ever to find a place in the repertory, we should hear it a few more times yet to savor its humor and originality before putting it on the shelf as an immature work." As for Pianist Kentner, he thinks the Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra is uneven, but, says: "The best part is certainly the last part, where we get to something like the real Bartok."

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