Bela Bartok / A Little Night Music

On this day in classical music: Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók died at age 64 in 1945. A student at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, Bartok befriended fellow student Zoltan Kodaly. Years later, they traveled widely throughout Hungary to collect ethnic and gypsy folk songs, some of which were incorporated into their music. As the political climate in Hungary worsened after the outbreak of World War II, Bartok and his wife Ditta emigrated to the United States in 1940. Their son Peter joined them two years later. Bartok’s health began to fail in 1940 and he found it difficult to compose. Fritz Reiner, a friend from their student days together, along with violinist Joseph Szigeti and Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Serge Koussevitzky, commissioned Bartok to write an orchestral piece. His outlook improved and he began composing the “Concerto for Orchestra.” Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony premiered the work in 1944 to great success. The five-movement concerto became Bartok’s best known work. Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra recorded Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra” in 1955, a riveting account that has never gone out of print. In 1944, Bartok was diagnosed with leukemia and would succumb to the disease in September 1945. Listen to the National Youth Orchestra of Canada perform the finale. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSJo1RnqfrE

On this day in the musical theatre: The London revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” opened in 1995. Judi Dench won an Olivier Award as best actress in a musical for her role as the actress Desiree Armfeldt. Listen to Dench perform “Send in the Clowns” at the BBC Proms, an 80th birthday tribute to Sondheim. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeA8AlctmSw

Musical musings: The heart of the production … is Judi Dench’s superb Desiree Armfeldt. It’s the second time in a year that she has played a grand, bad actress in the Olivier. The difference between Desiree and Chekhov’s Arkadina, though, is that the latter lives in a fortress of illusion, whereas the enduring quality of Sondheim’s all-too-experienced heroine, which Dench conveys beautifully, is the wry self-mockery and the feisty, stubborn hope that has not been soured by playing a hundredth Hedda in some provincial dump. Her husky-voiced rendering of “Send in the Clowns” is the most moving I’ve ever heard. – Paul Taylor writing in the London Independent

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