Bartók: Kossuth; Two Portraits; Suite No 1 CD review – vivid and colourful

Though these works hardly, as the sleeve note claims, show a "composer on the threshold of greatness", they do provide a useful snapshot of Bartók's music at the start of his composing life, in the 1900s. They reveal more about its origins than suggest the direction it was likely to take in the next decade. Composed in 1903, the symphonic poem Kossuth is the earliest and most ambitious of the three. Based on the 1848 exploits of the Hungarian national hero Lajos Kossuth, this 20-minute exercise in Straussian musical narrative is colourful and episodic, and shows Bartók's early gift for vivid orchestral effects. The folksy, overlong Suite No 1, from two years later, is even more of a rarity in the concert hall, while the Two Portraits – the first a movement borrowed from his First Violin Concerto – are affectionate miniatures, salon pieces almost. The Buffalo Philharmonic performances under JoAnn Falletta don't stint on what this music needs: energy and colour.