Keller András and the artists of Concerto Budapest created the program from the composer's works written for strings. The first piece is the String Quartet No. 3 which is the briefest representative of its genre. Bartók composed his 44 Duos for 2 Violins in the early 1930s. The master wrote them with an educational purpose in mind, not for the improvement of solo techniques but to provide the students with a good grounding in chamber music. The concert concludes with Bartók’s Divertimento scored for string orchestra.
Similarly to many of Bartók's other pieces, the Divertimento was also commissioned by the Swiss conductor, Paul Sacher, for his chamber orchestra. While the work evokes music from earlier periods, it is a Bartókian composition through and through. As the great Hungarian music historian Bence Szabolcsi put it: "It was as if during those dark years he had found his faith, his optimism. He had never written so accessibly as this time; he had never managed to sum up all the accomplishments of his life so effectively in a single great synthesis as in this piece." Reading these lines, we, too, perhaps feel that it is precisely the composition we need to hear most.