Béla Bartók: My Metallica | Adella

BARTÓK String Quartet No. 3 (arr. for string orchestra) BARTÓK Suite from “The Miraculous Mandarin” Music Director Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra thread two of Bartók’s demanding visions into a single, emotionally charged arc. Assistant Principal Violist Stanley Konopka premieres his new arrangement of Bartók’s String Quartet No. 3 — a score he devoured during his tumultuous Chicago adolescence, a time when “Bartók became kind of my Metallica.” Now amplified for double string orchestra, the music of the quartet swells to symphonic scale, taking on the expanded sonority long envisioned by Konopka. The program also features Bartók’s suite from the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, a seductively unsettling work that Welser-Möst casts as an artistic response to disorientation in the wake of the First World War. He proclaims Bartók’s detailed and exacting score — the composer's bold answer to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring — to be a formidable test for even the most seasoned orchestras. Crafted with surgical clarity, it has become, in the conductor’s words, “a show-off piece” — expressionistic, eruptive, and relentless in its demands.