At the first concert of the pianist Andras Schiff’s Perspectives series in Carnegie Hall, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, conducted by Ivan Fischer, played a Schubert overture, Bartók’s First and Third piano concertos (with Mr. Schiff as soloist) and Schubert’s Fifth Symphony. At the conclusion, Mr. Fischer offered the audience a choice of encores: Schubert or Bartók. He asked for a show of hands. There was an overwhelming majority for Bartók.
This was not the first time Bartók took part in a historic event. He was the soloist at the first performance of his own First Concerto, the one played by Andras Schiff in Carnegie Hall. The date was July 1, 1927, the occasion, the Summer of Music in Frankfurt during the International Music Exhibition, which marked Germany’s return to the civilized world after unleashing WWI.
The conductor was Wilhelm Furtwängler, There is no record of Furtwängler – a great musician but not a charming Hungarian like Ivan Fischer – giving the audience a choice of encores. But it was still a significant event: Furtwängler, the celebrated conductor of Beethoven and Wagner, the high priest of classical music, was presenting a harsh and dissonant work in which the piano was used as a percussion instrument. Later, Bartók himself wrote: “ I consider my first concerto a successful work, although its style is, up to a point, difficult, perhaps even very difficult, for the orchestra and the public.”
No doubt it was. But the event was a victory for modern music, just as the pro-Bartók vote was in Carnegie Hall eighty-four years later. Bartók (1881–1945) was still regarded as a modern composer and, of course, compared to Schubert, he was. But The New York Times’ music critic Anthony Tommasini’s hunch was that the vote would have gone the same way in favour of the truly modern composer Gyorgy Kurtag, born 1946 (NYT, December 11).
To be fair to one and all, the amiable Ivan Fischer eventually conducted two encores, a zesty Rumanian dance by Bartók and a lilting German dance by Schubert.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Gyorgy Kurtag is a new name to me, so naturally I went to Google to see if he has written anything for string quartet. His Opus 1 is a string quartet, some of which could be heard here
http://www.atonality.net/gyorgy-kurtag-string-quartet-no-1/
if we weren’t in Canada (some © nonsense) . . . So we have to make do with his 12 Microludes for SQ, available here
and here
Having heard that much, I think Mr Tommasini is wrong. If I had listened to any Kurtag during the concert, I’d vote for anybody but for the encore. But then I’m just a dinosaur.
At the time Kurtag was born, Bartok had already become widely respected as one of the main pillars of the contemporary music world. Yet within a few years he was destitute and seriously ill in New York City. I remember, as a student in Toronto at that time, scraping together a few dollars to contribute to a fund organized by fellow students to help Bartok. For the most part, the world seemed oblivious to his plight.
I would be interested (and I expect that your other friends would also) in knowing how you would have voted.
I have demonstrated my support for contemporary music in my novel, The Weimar Triangle, in which I used as a starting-point the Summer of Music (1927) where Bartók “premiered” his First Piano Concerto. So my ideological positon is clear. Having said that, I must answer Horace’s qustion by saying I would have voted for Schubert, whose musical personality I find irresistible, whereas I have always thought Bartók’s was unattractive.