Overview
Written at the height of World War II, Bartók’s late masterpiece brims with Hungarian dance rhythms and highlights every section of the orchestra to full effect. That same year, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Polish trailblazer Grażyna Bacewicz composed her vibrant Overture. Completed in 1918, Janáček’s symphonic rhapsody is a teeming, visceral score based on a Gogol story about a Cossack with his two sons fighting for Ukraine.