Rozsa - Tripartita For Orchestra

The name of Miklos Rozsa is most closely associated with his scores for some of the 20th century’s most notable Hollywood movies – Ben Hur and El Cid among them. But like a lot of film music composers, Rozsa also wrote for the concert hall.

His orchestral Tripartita – penned some 20 years after his Violin Concerto, which he wrote for the legendary violin virtuoso, Jascha Heifetz – is here given a fiery, full-blooded performance that showcases its energy and urgency. Werner Andreas Albert compels Philharmonia Hungarica to hit home the violence of music which, while post modern, is neither difficult nor remote.

War is declared

A bassoon, a snare drum, low strings and timpani troop a grumbling march. Against this menacing backdrop, higher strings, brass and woodwinds play a theme that could easily come from a WWII action movie. Picture grainy, black and white shots of tanks trampling barbed-wire defences on shell-pitted battlefields. The mood is one of impending war – which, as it breaks out (T5-0:50), causes the march to become bolder, wilder and more aggressive.

An oboe and a viola echo each other’s song (T5-1:33) – their voices dogmatically drowned out by the brief hammerings of strings and percussion. Then before long, there comes that march again.

As this first movement draws to a close, booming timpani, shattering cymbals, angry brass and piercing strings call to mind the horrors of mid-20th century Europe’s bloody conflict. This music may have been written in 1972, but it recalls 1942.

Wreckage and revenge

Rozsa’s ear for the cinematic is to the fore in the strange landscape of the second movement. A shell-shocked flute picks its way along streets choked with rubble after the onslaught of the first movement. Its voice is replaced by a shifting assortment of woodwinds, as we’re shown a succession of crumbling, smouldering buildings.

We’re brought eventually to a scene of senseless carnage: a hospital, school or church that had sheltered innocents lies utterly destroyed, rivered by blood. Tempted to anger as the orchestra evokes the horrific devastation (T6-5:30-6:55), we’re reminded by the solo violin’s grief in the movement’s dying minutes that violence begets only more destruction, more sorrow.

No surrender

The third and final movement begins riotously and chaotically. It is the madness of a mind bent on war, on crushing resistance. When the bombastic gives way to the intimate, we hear the inner-most machinations of this mind in the rhythmic clicking of wood blocks and the heartbeat of a bass drum (T7-0:58-1:20), as well as in the twinkling and whirring of a piccolo, harp and glockenspiel (T7-2:08-2:19).

There are moments of tenderness, such as the oboe and violin’s sad duet that gives this finale its bittersweet centre. But in the end, brutal brass, the relentless pounding of the bass drum’s gun, and the insanity and ugliness of war obliterate everything. Anyone expecting a heart-warming Hollywood ending from the man who made his name in movies has seen one too many films.