NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra / Igor Levit / Alan Gilbert

With his intellectually studied yet deeply emotional interpretations, his social engagement and his courageous political voice for equality, Levit has earned great respect on and off the concert stage. And Béla Bartók would certainly also have been enamoured of the fantastic Beethoven specialist and musical advocate of international understanding.

The piano concerto is framed by two works from Bartók’s later creative period: the Divertimento for String Orchestra was a 1939 commission for Paul Sacher, and was the last work Bartók wrote in his Hungarian homeland before emigrating to the USA. Bartók was inspired by the Baroque form of the »concerto grosso«, which is characterised by the distinctive switching between the solo and tutti passages. However, anyone expecting an imitation of Vivaldi, Bach & Co. doesn’t know Bartók: rhythmic accents, folk characters and dynamic contrasts give the music a typically Bartókian quality, mediating between tradition and modernity.