Concerto for Orchestra
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra • Marin Alsop

Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, one of his greatest works, was
written in the United States after the composer was forced to flee
Hungary during World War II. It is not only a brilliant display vehicle for
each instrumental section but a work of considerable structural ingenuity
that unites classical forms and sonorities with the pungency of folk
rhythms and harmonies. Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
explores darker moods through a score of marvellously poised symmetry.
This release follows Marin Alsop’s ‘riveting’ (Gramophone) Baltimore
Symphony recordings of Dvorák’s symphonies.

This has long been a popular coupling of works by Béla Bartók, but this
new release rides on the crest of a wave of previous successes and will
occupy a leading position amongst the competition on the quality of its
recording and performance. Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony
Orchestra have a synergy which has made their Dvorák symphonic
recordings sound ‘as fresh as when Dvorák put pen to paper’ (BBC Music
Magazine on the Symphonies 7 and 8, NBD 0010). Of Dvorák’s New
World Symphony (8.570714) BBC Music Magazine also wrote, ‘it is rare
to be able to say that a performance forces one to listen to a work anew,
but this is exactly what Alsop’s reading achieves.’

Marin Alsop made history with her appointment as the twelfth music
director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. With her inaugural
concerts in September 2007, she became the first woman to head a
major American orchestra. Her most recent appointment as principal
conductor of the Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra (OSESP),
starting in 2012, marks another historic appointment for her. In 2005,
Marin Alsop was named a MacArthur Fellow, the first conductor ever to
receive this prestigious award.