Margaret Mikulska wrote:

>Both are controversial, because they have little to do with Bartok.
>Bartok left a pile of chaotic sketches, too chaotic to speak of any
>"reconstruction".  Each can be better regarded as a new work, based on
>Bartok's sketches.  It does not represent Bartok's music, quite simply.
>For the same reasons, neither does the Bartok Jr/Neubauer work.
>
>I like Serly's work (I haven't heard the other (is it recorded?).  But
>it's not Bartok.  It may be Serly's best work, but not Bartok's.

My first recording of the Bartok/Serly viola concerto was on an LP, Bartok
Records BRS 309, conducted by Serly w/ Primrose as soloist.  Here are the
jacket notes of its provenance, written by Edward Jablonski.  After
describing what may in effect have been a race against the clock by Bartok
to complete the work that Primrose had commissioned (Bartok died September
26, 1945), the notes quote a letter from Bartok to Primrose, dated
September 8, 1945, which read in part:

   "I am very glad to be able to tell you that your viola concerto is
   ready in draft, so that only the score has to be written which means
   a purely mechanical work, so to speak.  If nothing happens, I can
   be through in 5 or 6 weeks, that is, I can send you a copy of the
   orchestra score in the second half of October, and a few weeks
   afterwards a copy (or if you wish more copies) of the piano score.

   "Many interesting problems arose in composing this work.  The
   orchestration will be rather transparent, more transparent than in
   a violin concert.  Also the sombre, more masculine character of your
   instrument executed some influence on the general character of the
   work.  The highest note is "S", but I exploit rather frequently the
   lower registers.  it is conceived in a rather virtuoso style.  Most
   probably some passages will prove to be uncomfortable or unplayable.
   These we will discuss later according to your observation."

The jacket notes then continue:

   "The draft turned out to be fifteen un-numbered pages of manuscript.
   What corrections he had intended to make, Bartok, rather than erase,
   added the changes in the margins, above the staves, wherever there
   happened to be space.  There were practically no indications as to
   the orchestration, and harmonies were reduced to the composer's
   private shorthand, understood only by a few close friends.

   "This was the formidable problem confronting Tibor Serly.  Deciphering
   the manuscript took many months; the sequence of the movements was
   established, and, because Bartok wrote on whatever paper happened to
   be at hand, sections of other compositions, intermixed with the Viola
   Concerto sketches, had to be segregated.  Also bits of material,
   evidently jotted down as they came to mind, were scattered throughout
   the draft with no regard to sequence, so that the untangling and
   reconstructing of the work called for infinite patience, an
   understanding dedication, and much hard work--a study in selflessness,
   for Serly, a composer himself, monitored his personal creative
   instincts, always objectively keeping in mind Bartok's intentions as
   he left them, however scrambled, in the sketches.  As for the
   orchestration, Serly reported that 'strangely [it] presented the
   least difficulty, for the voice leadings upon which the background
   is composed were clearly indicated in the manuscript.'....."

Walter Meyer