Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3, 3rd movement

Music Appreciation
Written By Edward Wolfe

Béla Bartók (1881-1945)

Hungarian composer Béla Bartók (1881 – 1945) did not quite complete his third piano concerto. He died with the last seventeen measures unwritten, composed by his close friend, Tibor Serly. In the linked performance on YouTube, the Third Movement begins at about 17:40. The entire concerto is about 25 minutes long in this recording.

Although the piece originally was planned as a concerto for two unaccompanied pianos, Bartók decided to recast it as a work for orchestra and solo piano.

When I was teaching piano, I frequently used Bartók’s collection of piano pieces Mikrokosmos. They are an amazing introduction to 20th-century piano idioms and techniques. They range through six volumes from the simplest little beginning pieces to advanced works suitable for the concert stage.

Edward Wolfe

Edward Wolfe has been a fan of Christian apologetics since his teenage years, when he began seriously to question the truth of the Bible and the reality of Jesus. About twenty years ago, he started noticing that Christian evidences roughly fell into five categories, the five featured on this website.
Although much of his professional life has been in Christian circles (12 years on the faculties of Pacific Christian College, now a part of Hope International University, and Manhattan Christian College and also 12 years at First Christian Church of Tempe), much of his professional life has been in public institutions (4 years at the University of Colorado and 19 years at Tempe Preparatory Academy).
His formal academic preparation has been in the field of music. His bachelor degree was in Church Music with a minor in Bible where he studied with Roger Koerner, Sue Magnusson, Russel Squire, and John Rowe; his master’s was in Choral Conducting where he studied with Howard Swan, Gordon Paine, and Roger Ardrey; and his doctorate was in Piano Performance, Pedagogy, and Literature, where he also studied group dynamics, humanistic psychology, and Gestalt theory with Guy Duckworth.
He and his wife Louise have four grown children and six grandchildren.

https://WolfeMusicEd.com
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