Antal Doráti

Although widely recognized today solely for his achievements on the podium, the distinguished Hungarian Antal Dorati grew up amid a household of musicians. He commenced musical training at five, took up the cello shortly afterward, and began formal composition studies at twelve, despite having already produced multiple pieces, among them three operas complete with his own libretti, all of which he later dismissed as juvenile.

Leo Weiner (1885-1960) served as Dorati’s initial composition instructor and left a lasting imprint on both his aesthetic preferences and his practical experience as a performer. Following a single year under Weiner, Dorati became the student of Zoltan Kodaly (1882-1967) and remained with him until the conclusion of his academic years.

Dorati joined the staff of the Budapest Opera House at eighteen, progressing from rehearsal coach to conductor of opera and ballet productions before establishing his principal identity on the symphonic stage. The demands of concert life halted his compositional activity for roughly two decades; by the mid-1950s, however, the urge to create returned with enough force that he completed one substantial score each year for a considerable period afterward.

Five years of preparation preceded the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, which Dorati composed during the summer of 1974 for his wife, Ilse Von Alpenheim, herself a member of a highly musical family. She introduced the richly tonal score—whose harmonic center lies in D—at Kennedy Center in the autumn of 1975. Dorati offered no apology for his adherence to tonality; in his program notes he even appeared somewhat defensive about writing tonal music during what he viewed as an age dominated by atonality or worse. The work follows a clear three-movement design. Its opening movement employs sonata form, presenting three distinct groups of ideas that undergo extensive development before a recapitulation and a concluding cadenza. The slow movement unfolds as a series of quiet variations on a central theme, interrupted by a turbulent middle section that carries its own development; the opening material then returns above muted drums. A complex rondo constitutes the finale, with recurrent statements of the principal subject, an intervening relaxed trio, a brief suspended passage that recalls themes from all three movements, and a stormy stretto that brings the work to a close.

Ilse Von Alpenheim recorded the concerto in the Kennedy Center concert hall in April 1976. Vox/Turnabout issued the performance on LP the following August; the same disc also contained her account of Dorati’s Variations on a Theme of Bartok, a demanding piece derived from the “Peasant Song” (No. 15) in Bartok’s Mikrokosmos.

Dorati’s Symphony No. 1 (1972) and Symphony No. 2 (1988) appear on a BIS compact disc, together with two choral-orchestral compositions, Jesus oder Barabbas? and Pater Noster, completed respectively in the year before and the year of his death.