Percussion performance – Newspaper Kommersant No. 153 (7354) dated 08/23/2022

The main event of the concert program of the Salzburg Festival this year was the cycle “Time with Bartok”. About why the Hungarian composer attracts the attention of musical commissaries and famous performers from Andras Schiff to Patricia Kopatchinska, tells Alexey Mokrousov.

The music of the Hungarian classic Béla Bartók (1881–1945) fit perfectly into the festival program. On the one hand, this is a continuation of the traditional cycle “Time since …”, the previous cycles were, in particular, dedicated to Shostakovich, Berio and Ustvolskaya. On the other hand, Bartók’s fate is a direct reflection of the grimaces and catastrophes of the 20th century; he is also a man of exile and despair. The leitmotif of the festival-2022, which can be reduced to the formula “flight, emigration, loneliness”, concerns him directly. In his youth, he managed to survive the charm of nationalism, even went to university in folk costumes, but in the end his views evolved towards “the brotherhood of peoples, brotherhood, despite all wars and strife.” In 1939, Bartok, a national treasure of Hungarian music, an outstanding teacher at the conservatory, unexpectedly left for many in Switzerland, and then to America. It would seem that what could threaten him under the regime of admiral-dictator Horthy? But he simply could not live in war-torn Europe.

It is not so easy to compose a program from his works: Bartok, who slowly evolved musically, began counting his opuses from one three times, believing that everything written before that was early, student, uninteresting. But the path from late romanticism to modernity was not a one-way movement. Bartok is the elite of the European avant-garde, his name was called on a par with the names of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, then he moved away from a radical rethinking of tradition and even gave a lecture at Harvard in the 1940s on the topic of revolutionaries in music: those two are revolutionaries, and he and Zoltan Kodai – traditionalists. One of the articles about him was called “The Art of Compromise”, the title conveys the peculiarities of the composer’s musical thinking. And yet few of his colleagues enjoy the same general respect and interest as Bartók; he influenced many, many had a professional interest in his legacy, from Luciano Berio and György Kurtág to Henri Dutilleux and Witold Lutosławski. Now in Salzburg, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard devoted an entire section of his concert to the relationship between György Ligeti and Bartók, Efim Bronfman united Bartók with Beethoven and Chopin – this makes the break with the romantic tradition more obvious, and Patricia Kopachinskaya and Fazyl Say included works by contemporaries in Bartók’s program: “Rhapsody » Ravel and Janacek’s Sonata for Violin and Piano.

Bartok’s eight nights’ playbill, not counting the opera “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” in the version of Romeo Castellucci and Theodor Currentzis, would also require an evening of Hungarian folklore, but here’s something, and folk songs have not yet been sung at the Salzburg Festival. For Bartók, folklore is the basis of everything, the themes of his most important works are connected with it. Interest in folk art at the beginning of the century was experienced by many, from Lyadov to Stravinsky, but perhaps the only professional musicologist among composers, and even specializing in folklore, was Bartok. He collected “peasant music” in Romania, Hungary and North Africa. Interest in folklore is also felt in works written for jazzmen: Hungarian dance melodies formed the basis of “Contrasts” for violin, piano and clarinet, they were performed by Isabella Faust, András Schiff and clarinet soloist of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra Daniel Ottensamer – he performs in chamber concerts with a variety of performers, from Misha Maisky and the Hagen Quartet to Daniel Barenboim and Thomas Hampson. “Contrasts” was commissioned to Bartok by the great clarinetist Benny Goodman; to be historically accurate, the order on behalf of Goodman and on his own behalf was made by the virtuoso violinist Jozsef Szigeti. Orders for the clarinet were in vogue – Stravinsky wrote a concerto for Woody Herman, Paul Hindemith and Aaron Copland wrote for Goodman. “Contrasts” is a case in the history of the 1930s, when the duration and content of a work were determined by the possibilities of recording. Szigeti immediately set his sights on the release of the disc – at that time, 17 minutes of recording were placed on two sides of the disc with a diameter of 12 inches. The customers wanted the opus to have two parts, and each of them would shine in “its own”. Bartók completed the slow part “as a gift”. The premiere took place in 1940 at Carnegie Hall; the author himself participated in the subsequent recording. At the same time, Szigeti performed with Richard Strauss in Salzburg in 1920 – hardly any festival is capable of such an interweaving of dates and destinies. The game with history happens by chance, it is not the goal of the current Salzburg quartermaster Markus Hinterhäuser, but the very density of the facts is such that they pop up at any moment: if not an anniversary, then a roll call.

The meaning of the cycle “Time from …” is not only in the masterful performance of things relatively well-known, although who and where played six Bartok quartets in two evenings, as the “Jerusalem Quartet” did now in Salzburg? Moreover, they did not play in a row, the first evening was devoted to odd quartets, the second to even ones, so it seemed more interesting to observe the evolution of Bartok, who felt uncomfortable because sometimes he writes so difficult. The meaning is also in the sound of things that few people have heard in recent years. Among the events is the performance of Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, which was released thanks to the order of the legendary musician and philanthropist Paul Sacher.

Pianists András Schiff and Denes Varjon repeated the seating arrangements of the 1938 concert in Basel, with Bartók and his wife also sitting with their backs to the audience, facing the drums. The famous Martin Grubinger and Erwin Falk from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra are located in the middle of a real arsenal – timpani, xylophone, drums of various types, including tam-toms. The pianists partially managed to turn the piano into drums – this is not a reproach, but a compliment to Schiff and Waryon, how subtle the instrument can be felt. It is a pity that the Sonata is unlikely to be heard in this line-up – Martin Grubinger decided after his fortieth birthday, which he will celebrate next May, to abandon the stage, focus on teaching and start studying history. If one can learn such freedom in handling one’s own biography from anyone, it is, of course, from Bartók.