Is Béla Bartók the 20th century’s most neglected composer?

Well, I thought Hewett's piece was the usual puffery. Unlike you guys he wasn't talking about people's CD collections but about concert life. We have heard all the major orchestral works of Bartok in London over the last decade or two. There have been three concert performances of Bluebeard's Castle conducted by Pierre Boulez alone. Music for SPC gets regular outings, as does The Miraculous Mandarin, often in the full version. Even The Wooden Prince has been done twice and it isn't really a very sympathetic piece to sit through in the concert hall. All the concertos get occasional outings, including the withdrawn 1st Violin Concerto and not long ago the Conc for 2 P&P. I've heard Cantata Profana twice. I guess much of this was done by Boulez. I am looking forward to Salonen's Bartok, but to compare Bartok to the (in my view deservedly) 'neglected' (in my view middlebrow composer liked only by CD collectors) Alwyn is ridiculous. Hewett should just have said that Salonen was carrying on a rich tradition of Bartok performance in London. Hacks, eh? 

Good research, David, and I agree re. Alwyn and others like him. Just glancing through the remainder of our local orchestra's schedule for this season it's full of the usual suspects. A surprising amount of Mahler - well, surprising in relation to my expectations anyway, harking back to the days when the RLPO was exploring the symphonies under Groves and we all felt very leading-edge. But when it does stray off the beaten track - a little Prokofiev, Britten, Liadov and Gliere - it almost always lands on one of those composers' minor and more popular works. Nielsen's 4th is probably the closest we get to a frisson of adventure.

Then there is the very thin sprinkling more way-out works, usually starting a concert, lasting no more than 12-15 minutes, heard for the first and last time. Some Takemitsu in there but no, Dubrob, no Xenakis.

As always the composers that fall through the cracks are that vast army writing their best stuff between 1910 and 1970, tonal or atonal. Lots of minor composers who are never going to get the chance to get major. But no Second Viennese School, no Stravinsky (we get the odd performance of the early ballets but seldom anything else), not even any Bartok. Strauss (R) makes it, probably on the strength of Kubrick's 2001.

Sadly, the name of the game is bums in seats and the concert planners have decided there are more people prepared to shell out for yet another run through of Beethoven's 4th or Tchaikovsky's 5th than want to hear Alwyn's 2nd, Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra, Bax's 6th, Homboe's 8th. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can't like what you've never heard.

In short, it would be far easier to draw up a list of un-neglected composers than the opposite.

The RLPO did some of his symphonies back in the late 60s/early 70s back when I lived there. I think they premiered one. Since then I've never run into him in the concert hall. I agree, 6 is one of his very best though I've never heard the Boult. To my ears there's no bad Rubbra, only some less-good (symphony 2, perhaps 3 and 9, the viola and violin concertos). His chamber and choral music is superb. In all honesty I don't find him Brucknerian although the comparison is certainly valid in one way - both have that sense of inner sanctity. Rubbra is one of those composers who continues to reward repeated listenings.

With Bartok's major works reasonably well known in Europe & the USA Hewett's comments are plainly nonsense, especially when compared with most British composers, as others have stated above. How many British composers are really known abroad?

SpiderJon wrote will their worth (whoever they are) eventually be recognized.

Well perhaps in some cases yes. With around half a dozen new recordings over the last couple of years it seems for example that Elgar's violin concerto is finally being recognized as one of the greatest of the genre and that's taken long enough!

Bax's Tintagel and Bridge's The Sea are in my view the equal of Debussy's La Mer yet who knows of them in comparison with the latter?

Sifox211 & Tagalie mention Bax and having just read Lewis Foreman's definitive biography of the composer Bax's works have been at the forefront of my interests of late. I was well aware of the symphonies and some tone poems beforehand but was quite unaware of the Symphonic Variations & Winter Legends for piano & orchestra which are actually more extensive than the symphonies and I have just been listening to recordings of them but perhaps Bax did himself no favours by giving his lover Harriet Cohen exclusive rights to them in her lifetime. Perhaps they are works that have come & gone in popularity. Cohen performed the Symphonic Variations at the Proms 7 times between 1920 & 1938; no Proms performances since. Symphony 3, the most played at the Proms has had 9 performances, the last in 1944.  Symphony 5 has had 2 performances, the last in 1984 and the only Bax symphony at the Proms since the 1953. Does he deserve better? Are Proms performances a guide to popularity, I suspect not? Vernon Handley seems to have indicated otherwise with Bax and I was intrigued to see that the first recording of the Symphonic Variations was by Handley's Guildford Philharmonic with the (real) Joyce Hatto on one of Barrington Coupe's bargain labels! (I've not heard that version but Foreman seems to like it).

If you ask me, I think all modern music is for the most part neglected. When people discuss classical music it usually pertains Beethoven, Bach, or Brahms, no one hardly speaks of someone like Luigi Nono. For instance, the books I’ve read on classical music usually devote about 20 to 30 pages of information on popular composers like Bach and Beethoven, which is great since I like these guys. But when I flipped to the back of the book to read about modern composers; Stockhausen and Xenakis each got a measly one page of coverage and Nono wasn’t even in the book. People, no doubt, respect modern composers but don’t seem the least bit interested in them. They’d rather listen to some old symphony from the 1700’s over and over again than explore some new and exciting music. I’m fairly new to classical I’ve already come across some remarkable modern works: Balakauskas’s Ostrobothnian Symphony and Ljubica Marić’s Byzantine Concerto to name a couple. But one can consider their self lucky if they happen to find more than one performance of any of these great modern works. Their discographies horribly neglected by CD manufacturers and their works are rarely even performed. How many times has Boulez’s Repons been performed in recent years? Not many. It seems people are generally behind with the times. Lets rewind to the mid-1800’s, right around the time Wagner was rising to fame. His music very radical for his time. A lot of the critics despised him. They mostly preferred the older style of music such as that of Brahms, Beethoven, or Bach. And nowadays, Wagner is highly regarded by people and critics alike, but the works of Stockhausen and Xenakis aren’t too popular. Notice the pattern? Look all I’m saying is this; maybe, perhaps instead of listening to Tchaikovsky’s 5th symphony for the thousandth time, play something like Xenakis’s Metastasis instead for a change.

As for Bartók; I finally got to listen to his Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta and man is it ever creepy! The third movement immediately reminded me of The Shining, which is a good thing. And although he’s not too popular with general public, he is highly regarded amongst the critics. However, despite his greatness and originality, he does seem to be overshadowed by the other “giants” of his time. Perhaps Béla Bartók is the great underdog of classical music.

Frostwalrus I have despaired with music history books. The 20th century is, whether you like it or not, the most diverse and complex 100 years in the history of music, and should therefore merit a large proportion of any history book not the usual tenth it gets as you rightly said. I think it is just laziness on the part of the writers. What you said about Wagner was correct, but Wagner was being performed and listened to, however much people didn´t approve.

I think there should be a moratorium on all live performance of 19th century works, with occassional exceptions for anniversaries and such. I am not for one moment suggesting that Beethoven, Tchaikiovsky, Schubert or Dvorak are not composers of glorious music, but they have had a fair shake, and they are big enough to take care of themselves, it´s time we gave some of the other more modern guys a fair crack of the whip. If we don´t classical music will cease to exist as a relevant part of Western culture, because composers and their listening peers will be utterly estranged from each other, if they already aren´t.