Bartók Spring Magazine 2022

Volume 2, April, 2022

Magazine of the Bartók Spring International Arts Weeks

EXPERIENCE! In every respect.

2

Corporate partner:

Müpa Budapest is supported by the Ministry of Human Capacities

mupa.hu

DEAR AUDIENCE, Many decades ago when I first moved to New York, while out walking I came upon a curious sight.

Just off 8th Avenue on West 57th Street, I found a memorial plaque to Béla Bartók. He had spent his final years in the building towering before me, where he died in poverty, in rough circumstances, only weeks after the final hours of the Second World War. The experience was defining for me: one of the most important musicians died right here, in this particular manner.

Bartók’s music has accompanied me on my journey since childhood: I mastered some of the pieces of Mikrokosmos at a very early age courtesy of a teacher who was a fan of the composer.

The story of one of the first scores I owned is also connected to him. I grew up in Philadelphia, and one day I acquired the sheet music for the String Quartet No. 2, which I thoroughly browsed through at home before an evening concert. I found I had an enormous amount of respect for both the musicologist and the pianist in him, and I can safely say that ours is a continuous relationship that has lasted for many, many decades.

The Bartók Project is a mark of this many-faceted interest. At this concert the Hungarian audience will have the chance to hear two outstanding fellow musicians I’ve known for a long time, drummer Jim Black and saxophonist Chris Speed. I am also delighted to once again take the stage with cimbalom player Miklós Lukács, and look forward

to playing together with two other Hungarian musicians, Petra Várallyay and Mátyás Szandai.

What would give me the greatest pleasure is if others came to our concert besides admirers of Bartók and jazz fanatics. This project of mine – as before in the case of other composers who are important to me – may seem a little selfish with respect to Bartók: we will play music that is based on his musical thinking and the structures he built, and it will most certainly never be heard again in this form. But I trust that the relationship I have had with Bartók’s music for decades will convince you that I have no intention of being disrespectful towards the great Hungarian composer – indeed, quite the contrary.

Béla Bartók is part of our lives: as children we learned to play music with him, and since then – as we continue to mature – we have never ceased to marvel at the complexity of his music. If we spend enough time studying his works, perhaps we may find our own answers to the eternal questions he asked.

URI CAINE

01

Greetings

02

Contents

04

“I ran away from Bartók’s works to avoid falling into repetition” – An interview with composer Péter Eötvös

08

Ploughing deep in the fertile land of sensitive jazz Jaimie Branch

10

Monsieur Bartók The influence of Bartók in contemporary jazz

12

The Editor Recommends

14

How many singers were in the Thomaskirche choir?

Philippe Herreweghe and Ton Koopman

18

Extremely personal Recirquel Budapest: IMA

20

“We all use the falsetto register” An interview with Anthony Roth Costanzo

24

Dialogue in jazz Discovering the unknown

26

From the Tisza to Sidi Zarzour Béla Bartók’s trip to North Africa

30

The Editor Recommends

32

Music for the eyes Music short films at Budapest Ritmo

36

An enthralling rite of spring

38

Secession: birth of a Hungarian style of architecture

42

“Let’s rediscover our beautiful cities!”

A conversation with Csaba Káel, CEO of Müpa Budapest

Péter Eötvös | Photo: Szilvia Csibi / Müpa Budapest

“I ran away from Bartók’s works to avoid falling into repetition” AN INTERVIEW WITH COMPOSER PÉTER EÖTVÖS Péter Eötvös was fifty when he started writing his first opera, Three Sisters. He completed his latest operatic work, Sleepless in 2020; following its premiere in Berlin, a concert performance of the work arrives on stage at Müpa. How many books does he read when looking for a subject, and how long do we have to wait for his first opera in Hungarian? Learn this and more from our interview with one of the most sought-after composers in contemporary opera.

4

You recently finished your thirteenth opera, Sleepless. What is the essence of the genre for you?

I regard opera primarily as a theatrical genre. Just as in prose theatre, the story, the dramaturgical structure of the conflict is important. Opera differs from theatre in that the music determines the tempo of the action and creates a distinctive world of sound, as well as a mental state for the viewer that shapes and influences their relationship to what they see on stage and what is said in the text. In this regard, opera is related to film, whose

makers guide our vision in a similar way. For me the genre of opera is an absolute miracle; it’s incredible that 400 years ago someone sensed its power so perfectly, and that it exists to this day.

Sleepless is an opera ballad. Why was it important for you to think in balladic terms?

Because that was what the story dictated from the start. The ballad is a simultaneously timeless, lyrical and epic genre that sets a defined framework for the literary and musical style. The key models for me are

the ballads of János Arany, in which, besides the inevitability of fate, repetition plays an important role.

The latter is also crucial in musical composition: it lends emphasis to the most important points over the transitional passages so that the message remains in the listener’s memory. The balladic tone is quite rare in opera, with Lohengrin and Pelléas et Mélisande perhaps coming closest. In these works, there is less emphasis on the action than on the narrative style itself and the fateful events in the lives of the protagonists. From the compositional perspective, this means that the music has a kind of constant tension that maintains the whole piece within the framework of the epic form and somewhat removed from reality.

What defines the musical character of the new opera?

Sleepless comprises thirteen scenes, each associated with a given tonic note; not in the sense of the key, but as the central note to which all other notes relate. This relationship is manifest on the level of intervals, depends on the degree of consonance or dissonance of a given sound compared to the tonic note. The opera begins and ends at the seashore, so the central note of both the opening and closing scenes is B. All twelve notes take their turn in the intermediate scenes, providing the character of each scene in the manner of pale or saturated colours. This is nothing new: in Mozart’s operas, the key in which something sounds carries a similar dramaturgical significance.

What did you use in Sleepless?

The harmonies are built on traditional European triads, i.e. major, minor, diminished and augmented triads. I find it interesting to use these because there’s a tradition that evolved over centuries, and which held firm until the 20th century, for the major triad to express strength and happiness, the minor pain and sorrow, while the diminished chord signals tragedy and impending danger for the protagonists.

So there’s no need to explain on hearing any one of these whether its meaning is positive or negative.

The augmented triad appeared in the music of earlier times fairly seldom, and here I associate it with the dream world. The main protagonist, Alida is constantly fleeing into her dreams, while her companion, Asle, suffering from sleeplessness, makes decisions that lead to tragedy. With the help of meanings associated with the four chord types, I’m able to guide the audience through the story.

I also used two quotations from Norwegian folk music that set the tone of the entire opera. Right at the beginning, a lullaby is heard with a melody and tonality so distinctive that, whenever it reappears, it evokes the figure of Alida and the child she may give birth to at any moment. As for Asle’s father, he turns out to have played the fiddle at weddings, and the boy too is trying to earn a living that way.

There’s a distinctive type of Norwegian violin known as the Hardanger fiddle, which has four resonance strings underneath the four main strings. The former

are not touched by the bow, but produce a unique timbre by lengthening the resonance of the notes played. There are countless recordings circulating on YouTube under the title “Fanitullen,” and this is the melody I paired with the figure of Asle.

How do you choose a theme when writing an opera?

Even the two early chamber operas and my first full-length opera were commissioned works. Since I’m not writing for myself but for a given opera house, I must be aware of the given national culture, while the identity of the client also fundamentally influences the choice of theme. When I receive a request, I and my wife – who is also my librettist – begin gathering material: we read through 20 to 30 books, screenplays and plays, discuss them and then consult on them with the commissioning opera house. They’re the people best placed to decide which of our proposals can be best incorporated into the season and its thematic content, so that the range of topics continually narrows until reduced – at the last meeting – to one literary piece from which we begin to work.

What makes a book a winner with you?

The fact whether a sonic palette takes shape in my mind that might prove specific to an opera that could be based on that work. If one does, then that text holds potential. I will then merely need to unfold this sound palette, which is condensed into a single moment, in a logical manner, and employ it appropriately in the process of composition.

At the same time, there is another point of departure that my wife and I insist upon, and that is the importance of working from contemporary literary works. This is because I don’t wish for the lives of my operas to be limited to the premiere and a few additional performances, but – fitting into the 400-year line of operatic tradition – for them to be played in the future as well; for audiences to be ready to listen to them and find a connection with them. Every opera represents and conveys the age in which it was written, and my operas will only be able to deliver the most complete message about our time to future generations when their librettos are derived from contemporary raw materials.

As a reader, which literary themes, genres and periods interest you most?

I cannot give a specific answer to that question, but I’ll read anything put in front of me, just as in music I’ll listen to anything because I want to leave open every opportunity to be influenced by artistic phenomena. I believe that someone who writes for the stage needs to be familiar with everything; that they must subject themselves to every influence in order to be able to place it in any one of their works at the opportune moment.

The broader the palette of my reading, the more colourful the sound images forming around me and the richer the material I will provide to the audience.

5

What is your relationship to Bartók’s stage works?

I might have been ten years old when my mother brought me to Budapest and we saw the three Bartók works; at that time, Bluebeard’s Castle, The Miraculous Mandarin and The Wooden Prince were performed together. The sonic palette burned into my mind and has since formed an essential musical language in me; what one might call a mother tongue. I had encountered Bartók’s music before: I started playing piano at the age of four, and his works – besides those of Bach and Mozart – featured in my very first lessons. I’m grateful to my teachers that at that time, in the 1950s, they already included Bartók in the curriculum; these early encounters laid the foundations of my later work as a composer. I first conducted Bluebeard in London in the 1980s, and on innumerable occasions thereafter in concert and staged performance alike. It became a fundamental part of my repertoire and my musical thinking.

of Resistance, on a commission from the Budapest Opera House. I chose Krasznahorkai primarily because his wording and collocations are very distant from the balladic style of [Bluebeard librettist] Béla Balázs, so I have greater courage in beginning the task of creating a new operatic sonic palette in the Hungarian language. But it’s true of almost every one of those works of Bartók I have encountered in my life that it has had a great influence on me. I did try to run away from them to avoid even accidentally falling into repetition. I feel that Ligeti and Kurtág had a similar relationship to Bartók. Bartók’s musical thinking is our mother tongue: it is through his creation of melody, chords and tone that we found our own styles.

FANNI MOLNÁR

Nevertheless, you have written operas exclusively to texts in foreign languages.

That’s right, and the reason I haven’t composed a single opera in Hungarian is Bluebeard. Its prosody, melodies and libretto are so powerful that I feared whatever I wrote would be connected to it in some way. In foreign languages, I felt independent of the influences of Bartók. But just this January I began my first Hungarian opera, based on László Krasznahorkai’s novel, The Melancholy

6

Péter Eötvös | Photo: Szilvia Csibi / Müpa Budapest

12 April | 7 pm Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

PÉTER EÖTVÖS: SLEEPLESS – Hungarian premiere Alida: Victoria Randem Asle: Linard Vrielink Mother / Midwife: Katharina Kammerloher Old woman: Hanna Schwarz Girl: Sarah Defrise Innkeeper: Jan Martiník Man in black: Tómas Tómasson Boatman: Roman Trekel Jeweller: Siyabonga Maqungo Asleik: Arttu Kataja Sextet: Samantha Britt, Alexandra Ionis, Rowan Hellier, Kristín Anna Guðmundsdóttir, KirstenJosefine Grützmacher, Alexandra Yangel Six fishermen: Matthew Peña, Sotiris Charalampous, Fermin Basterra, Jaka Mihelač, Rory Green, Jonas Böhm Featuring: Hungarian National Philharmonic Conductor: Péter Eötvös

7

Jaimie Branch | Photo: Abdesslam Mirdass

Ploughing deep in the fertile land of sensitive jazz 8

Here’s a chance to witness an extraordinary event, a live performance by the artist who recorded some of the most important jazz CDs of the past decade. Jaimie Branch, one of the most forward-looking of contemporary jazz musicians presents songs based on the 2017 album, Fly or Die and its 2019 follow-up, Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise. The trumpeter and singer is the purveyor of a personal, political and socially sensitive brand of music that always seeks out new paths to explore, and which played a key role in the resurgence of jazz as a broadly popular genre in the 2020s.

Born in New York, Jaimie Branch grew up in Chicago.

She studied music in Boston, before moving back to Chicago to serve a musical apprenticeship that also took in the city of her birth. From the mid-2000s, she participated in a plethora of projects and bands, honing her musical voice to the point where she was ready to perform under her own name in the 2010s.

With the release of her albums on International Anthem, a leading contemporary jazz label, she has not only become one of the record company’s flag bearers, but has taken her place among the leading figures on the contemporary jazz scene overall. It is no exaggeration to say that Branch at once represents a model and inspiration for the new Chicago school of jazz, for female-led groups, and for musicians producing jazz of a personal, distinctive character.

UNEXPLORED PATHS Jaimie Branch has become a key figure in contemporary jazz at a time when the fresh approach she brings is generally characteristic of the genre over the last decade. While not disputing the merits of artists in the early years of the 21st century, jazz clearly entered a new dimension with the release of Kamasi Washington’s triple album The Epic. The 2015 record was a watershed in the music of the last decade, its mainstream success leading to a renewed interest in jazz among the wider public, which in turn stimulated the genre’s development. Jazz has become fashionable again among young trend-setting circles and, reacting to this, emerging new talents have made the genre exciting once more, interacting with other forms from hip hop to soul to post-rock. The brand of spiritual jazz epitomised by Washington has reemerged as a significant trend, with creative bases established to move the tendency forward in the US and the UK, centred in Chicago and London, respectively.

In Chicago, innovative performers have gathered around the International Anthem label, with Branch soon joining the group of outstanding artists in this circle that includes Makaya McCraven, Angel Bat Dawid and Irreversible Entanglements. With her triumphant 2017 debut album Fly or Die, a hybrid of elements from Chicago and New Orleans, Branch not only put herself on the map but marked out her own territory on it. This realm is an unusual combination of a basic quartet of trumpet, cello, double bass and drums, which is occasionally supplemented with guitar or winds, and speaks an easily accessible musical language that is amply surrounded by rhythmically catchy peaks and with hints of blues and West African music.

Petter Molvær or Arve Henriksen. In her younger days, as a great believer in collaboration, she played in a variety of groups including Keefe Jackson’s Project Project, New Fracture Quartet and Galactic Unity Ensemble, before going on to collaborate in popular music projects that called for her jazz attitude and sensitive playing. Shared musical adventures with acclaimed experimental rock bands such as TV On The Radio, Spoon and Bell Orchestre had a reciprocal influence on her style. Branch’s second album augmented her sound with the addition of her vocals, albeit only on two tracks, sung in an entirely offbeat style for the genre, with an almost punk-like vehemence reminiscent of Patti Smith. The atypical attitude she brings to her vocal performance might be compared, among contemporaries, to the passionate delivery of spoken word artist Moor Mother, co-leader of Irreversible Entanglements. To this we might add that recent years have seen a welcome increase in prominent female band leaders in jazz: it is enough to mention Mary Halvorson, Matana Roberts or Esperanza Spalding.

With her explosion onto the scene, Branch has risen to join them as an unconventional jazz singer who typically follows the path of the genre’s great innovators.

SENSITIVELY ATTUNED Another area where Jaimie Branch stands out is in the increasingly personal approach to music adopted in the genre, extending to the choice of musical themes. After a debut album built mainly on improvisation, Branch took a still more experimental turn on her 2019 follow-up, Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise. Her sound became darker, but at the same time even more captivating and varied. The frenzied beats and undulating structure of the album, and its emphasis on socially and politically sensitive themes, resulted in a truly distinctive work that stands as a sharp reaction to the current public mood – thereby helping jazz once more gain greater ground in mainstream music. Branch is thus a genuinely “topical” performer whom we get the chance to see live at the top of her game, together with the superb band that was featured on her latest album. Drummer Chad Taylor is an outstanding and renowned musician in his own right, but bassist Jason Ajemian, highly regarded in Chicago jazz and underground circles, and cellist Lester St Louis Jr. also complement Jaimie Branch’s trumpet playing perfectly. Seeing them live is a must – and what better opportunity than now?

ENDRE DÖMÖTÖR

AN UNCONVENTIONAL VOCALIST Branch also treads an unusual path in that her trumpet playing, even in the solo work bearing her own name, is assigned a no more prominent role than the full ensemble playing of the group. Among others, her playing is greatly influenced by Don Cherry, Axel Dörner and Dave Douglas, but a kinship can also be discerned with Nordic trumpet legends such as Nils

6 April | 8 pm Budapest Music Center – Opus Jazz Club

JAIMIE BRANCH: FLY OR DIE Featuring: Jaimie Branch – trumpet, Lester St Louis – cello, Jason Ajemian – double bass, Chad Taylor – drums

9

1.

Monsieur Bartók In the afterlife of Béla Bartók’s music, the expiry of copyright protection for his works (2016) brought a significant change. In the years that have elapsed since, there have been a number of outstanding adaptations of his compositions, into which new life has been breathed – not surprisingly – in the world of jazz above all. In an implicit way, Bartók’s universal sound carries the feel of jazz, if lacking distinct motifs that can be grasped. His ability to react quickly, to translate raw musical material into his own language within moments, is likewise a distinctive feature of jazz. Bartók was already a base of reference in jazz when it still counted as the entertaining and light (light-hearted) music of night clubs, before the genre began to build its own idioms and structures (i.e. before it became artistic). From this perspective, Bartók made a huge contribution to the evolution of jazz, helping it to get to where it is today after a journey of some 130 years.

10

The development of jazz naturally does not follow a straight upward trajectory. It far more closely resembles the leafy canopy of a many-branched tree on which many different fruits – of the widest variety of tastes and aromas – all grow at once.

Duke Ellington already mentioned Bartók’s music as a source of inspiration in interviews. Another known reference is the composition Giant Steps

by John Coltrane, in which he applies Bartók’s axis system and chord substitution. When discussing Béla Bartók’s relationship with the greatest jazz musicians, we cannot ignore Chick Corea, who drew from the Mikrokosmos and For Children series throughout his life and worked with them until his recent death, as he explained in his daily online blog.

Perhaps it was no accident that he gave the title Concerto for Trio to the piece he wrote at Müpa’s request that had its posthumous premiere this March. A characteristic motif of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is likewise echoed on the 1963 album Quiet Nights by Gil Evans and Miles Davis; just as on the extraordinary solo piano album by perhaps the greatest jazz bassist of all time, Charlie Mingus, the opening track explicitly follows the contours of the melody of the Pe loc movement of Romanian Folk Dances. “I reckon that some sort of intense spiritual affinity can be observed between Bartók and jazz musicians that is difficult to describe in words, despite the fact that there are numerous clear and concrete musical elements that link the

two worlds,” wrote the brilliant pianist Dániel Szabó in his essay Bartók as Jazz Inspiration. This same connection becomes obvious in the work of other Hungarian musicians such as Kálmán Oláh, András Párniczky and Csaba Palotai, and although the younger generation is now consciously engaging with Bartók, the reverse of the situation, as seen from Bartók’s perspective, is in fact equally true.

Recordings on which the composer plays his own pieces on the piano are well known. Bartók had an ambivalent relationship to jazz, but for all his angularity, his playing and his works radiate determination, fire, courage and a thirst for freedom that appears as a metaphor for his musical flights of imagination. To this day, his compositions provide ample ammunition for – and, in a certain sense, clearly reflect – the complexity of modern jazz, from respect for tradition, to fixed forms of composition and innovations alike, to the spontaneous sparking of that inexplicable inner flame. With his Bartók Project, an event that promises to be a highlight of this Bartók Spring, Uri Caine finally gets the chance to add his adaptations, inspirations and reimaginings of Bartók’s works to the great series of his life’s work that already contains music by Mahler, Wagner, Bach, Schumann, Beethoven, Mozart and Vivaldi. Looking at that roll-call, it may be hard to believe that reworking classical music is not Caine’s main speciality. An eminent figure of New York’s avant-garde, Caine is a classically trained pianist but also a radical improviser in certain musical company, who is also able to use jazz’s wonderfully uncompromising light to subtly illuminate Jewish culture. At Trafó in 2006, after the concert of his Hungarian Project, I presented Caine with an old 1,000-forint Hungarian banknote as a memento, which – we well remember – was adorned with Bartók’s likeness. He immediately recounted how he had visited Hungary in the mid-1980s and had pocketed one of these notes from that time, proudly treasuring it ever since. Caine and his regular partners, together with the superb Hungarian musicians from Mihály Dresch’s circle joining him for this concert, embody the Bartókian ideal which the composer did not have the opportunity in his

lifetime to represent; nevertheless, the ideal has continued to flourish in spirit and sprout more and more shoots since his death. In Bartók’s work, microscopically precise knowledge of the source material and strict composition are often allied to parlando-rubato, the performing freedom which became the cornerstone of jazz in the form of improvisation, albeit supported from many other directions. Péter Sárik takes a different approach when he translates Bartók’s only opera into plain language; and by plain, he means jazz. Sárik has adapted classical works before, but Bluebeard’s Castle, by virtue of its density and theme, is certainly no simple task. Even so, the piano trio has succeeded in preserving the values of the musical drama within gracefully elegant bounds. A looser adaptation of the work is unarguably a huge undertaking, but is not without precedent: Charlie Chaplin also managed to sensitively capture the story of Bluebeard, the roots of which reach back to the Middle Ages, in his brilliant film Monsieur Verdoux.

ZOLTÁN VÉGSŐ

1. Krisztián Gál: Illustration for Péter Sárik's album, Bluebeard's Castle – Jazz Adaptation

3 April | 7.30 pm Várkert Bazár – Event Hall

BLUEBEARD Bluebeard: Krisztián Cser Judith: Adrienn Miksch Featuring: Zoltán Bubenyák – keyboards, Sárik Péter Trio, Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra Strings Members of the trio: Péter Sárik – piano, Tibor Fonay – double bass, Attila Gálfi – drums Conductor: Gábor Hollerung

10 April | 8 pm Müpa Budapest – Festival Theatre

URI CAINE: BARTÓK PROJECT Featuring: Petra Várallyay – violin, Chris Speed – saxophone, clarinet, Uri Caine – piano, Miklós Lukács – cimbalom, Mátyás Szandai – double bass, Jim Black – drums

11

2.

3 and 4 April | 7 pm Müpa – Festival Theatre

1.

1 April | 7.30 pm Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

Julia Fischer (violin) and the RundfunkSinfonieorchester Berlin SLAVIC RELATIVES AND THE ZEN MAESTRO “When I play a tour with Vladimir Jurowski, that carries me through the next weeks and months. There’s so much inspiration: so many ideas, so much musical input. Then, when the tour is over, you’re fired up instead of exhausted.” Such justifiably enthusiastic praise for the conductor Vladimir Jurowski was offered in an interview given recently by none other than the brilliant violinist Julia Fischer, who now prepares to perform in Budapest in the company of the “Zen maestro” of conducting. The accompanying orchestra is Jurowski’s German ensemble, the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra – although it would undeniably be more accurate to say one of Jurowski’s German ensembles, since he also holds the post of general music director of the Bavarian State Opera.

The Slavic programme of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, which celebrates the centenary of its foundation next year, opens with a composition by a true Olympian, namely the Czech composer Josef Suk, winner of a silver medal in the art competition at the 1932 Olympic Games. It is not the medal-winning composition that can be heard at the concert, but his 1903 Fantastic Scherzo. Suk, who married the daughter of his one-time teacher, Antonín Dvořák, will be followed by his father-in-law. Dvořák’s œuvre is represented here on the programme by his only violin concerto, originally written for Joseph Joachim, though the legendary violinist never actually performed the piece in concert. Its final movement evokes the furiant, a Bohemian folk dance, which is very apposite, as the title of the closing piece of the concert promises dances from a Slavic composer.

What Rachmaninoff’s suite of Symphonic Dances vividly illustrates, above all, is the depth of nostalgia the composer felt for his homeland in his final exile, and also that even in his final years he retained both an open mind and a sure sense of what would prove popular.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

12

Photo: Uwe Arens Photo: Csaba Mészáros Photo: Christoph Neumann Tsuyoshi Anzai: Distance (detail), 2020 Photo: Misi Kondella / Liszt Academy

Royal Ballet Fehérvár: Parade – premiere FIERY BALLET FROM THE SOUTH Who wouldn’t recognise the fiery Balkan brass band music of Boban Marković, with which Boban, who was born into a musical family, made his mark when gathering laurels at the Guča Trumpet Festival, before earning global fame lending his music to films by Emir Kusturica (Arizona Dream, Underground), and then going on to fire the craze for Balkan brass in his own right?

In the meantime, Marković has not merely “reached” Hungary, but has attached himself and his ensemble by many threads to this country through collaborations with Félix Lajkó and Hungarian record labels. For a long time the famous trumpeter performed with his son in the joint ensemble Boban i Marko Marković Orkestar, but after Marko took off on a solo path Boban once again took the reins on his latest, Hungarianproduced album. Released in 2019, Mrak (Darkness) unexpectedly shot to the top of the World Music Charts Europe, voted for by the continent’s radio DJs. It is this music that the Royal Ballet Fehérvár has used to create its production, Parade, a blend of staged concert and contemporary dance theatre which expresses a feeling for life that is at once dynamic, dramatic and sarcastic.

4.

3.

5.

6 April | 7.30 pm Budapest Music Center – Concert Hall

7 April | 6 pm Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art

7 and 12 April | 7.30 pm Liszt Academy – Main Hall

Ensemble Mini

Extended present Global States of Transitoriness

Dénes Várjon (piano) and the Concerto Budapest

STOPPING TIME If we could stop an hourglass, then we could stop time itself – a nice thought experiment, but impossible in reality. Of course all the minute grains of sand in an hourglass eventually trickle through and, in a way, until we turn the peculiar little device over, its time “stops.” Very rarely, you may experience something similar, when, for example, you slip on an icy road and start to fall.

The situation may be inescapable, but suddenly everything around you slows down; you see yourself closer and closer, more and more clearly, and though you see how the accident is happening, no matter how much time slows down you cannot avoid your fate. This is the focus of investigation in the new exhibition at the Ludwig Museum, entitled Extended Present: Global States of Transitoriness. Reality captured in a frozen moment is something we may observe closely for a while within an extended unit of time, but if we are cunning we may grasp it as it transforms from one state to another. Through a variety of techniques and media, the exhibition addresses current themes – among them the coronavirus pandemic, and transitoriness as a familiar constant – and may, perhaps for a moment, stop time around us.

TWO CLASSICAL BS At first glance, the initials BB may remind senior citizens of Brigitte Bardot. If, however, they are music-lovers and concert-goers alike, then it might also soon occur to them just how preeminent a role the vagaries of chance have assigned the initial letter B in the history of music. The surnames of a whole host of great composers begin with this letter, and two of these – Beethoven and Bartók – are now ranged side by side in two concerts featuring the pianist Dénes Várjon as soloist, with orchestral accompaniment provided by András Keller’s Concerto Budapest. The two concerts each feature one of the most famous of Beethoven’s symphonies commonly bearing an epithet, namely the Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) and Symphony No. 5 (“Fate”). Preceding each of these will be, respectively, Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 2, the work that foreshadowed his “Beethovenian” period, and the hugely popular Piano Concerto No. 3, as well as the composer’s youthful Two Portraits and Two Pictures.

A REVOLUTIONARY SMALL ENSEMBLE As a representative of the latest wave of contemporary classical music, British conductor Joolz Gale seeks a suitably fresh approach to the challenges of the time.

Over a decade ago, in 2010, he put together an ensemble comprising soloists from Germany’s leading symphony orchestras, who perform chamber arrangements of symphonic works. The idea is not entirely new, of course, as private performances in Vienna by Arnold Schoenberg one hundred years ago served as a model for creating transcriptions that also promote a deeper understanding of the original works. Ensemble Mini has travelled the world, gathering prestigious accolades along the way and creating a sensation with its performances, just as it has with its latest recording, a recreation of Mahler’s unfinished 10th symphony. With its radical reimagining of the work, the ensemble enjoyed one of its most prominent successes last year, winning an OPUS Klassik award for best chamber music recording. With this in mind, our excitement can only increase as we wait to see what Ensemble Mini will do with well-known works

by Béla Bartók, at what promises to be an unmissable concert.

The exhibition is on view between 8 April and 4 September.

13

Ton Koopman | Photo: Hans Morren

How many singers were in the Thomaskirche choir?

14

This spring in Budapest sees concerts by two pioneers of the early music movement, Philippe Herreweghe and Ton Koopman. More than half a century ago, they shocked audiences when appearing on stage in jeans with period instruments. It was a time when, runs a contemporary joke, an easy way to start a fight in a roomful of Bach specialists was to ask the question in our title. Since then, these early music pioneers have become eminent stars, but we cannot forget how much has changed in music since the choice between harpsichord or piano – or gut or metal strings – was seen as a mere incidental detail in the performance of baroque music.

At the turn of the 20th century, when historians gained an increasing number of tools for research into Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great or the Sun King, scholarly advances also expanded the library of original sheet music, textbooks and centuries-old documents available to music historians. As the sources multiplied, so did the questions. What tunings and instruments were used by renaissance and baroque musicians?

What do musical scores signify and what is implied by period practice? Where and how should we perform the masterpieces of Palestrina, Bach and Vivaldi to enjoy an authentic experience?

The rediscovery of early music in the 1950s began not in the major institutions of classical music, but in semi-professional choirs and among musicologists and performers who yearned for a new paradigm out of rebellion, a messianic sense of mission or scholarly curiosity. The first pioneers who took to the stage as historically informed performers on period instruments were soloists or chamber musicians, including Wanda Landowska, Gustav Leonhardt and Frans Brüggen. From the early 1970s, however, they were joined by new ensembles and choral societies, and a market opened for valveless horns, gut strings and baroque bows. Dissatisfaction also grew with the traditional symphony orchestra, seen by early music proponents as an antiquated, hierarchical structure and a symbol of suppressed creativity and blind subservience to the conductor.

As Ton Koopman recalls, the conformists said of the progressives – many of whom were amateur musicians – that while they had dreams, they could not play, to which the progressives’ rejoinder was that behind the virtuosity of symphonic musicians there was not a single idea. “That was a real black and white struggle for a long time,” says the conductor, who began his career as an organist and harpsichordist. People had to choose sides.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt gave up his position as a cellist at the Vienna Symphony and founded his own ensemble. Cloyed by the “official” music landscape, John Eliot Gardiner exploded onto the scene at the age of 20 with Monteverdi’s forgotten magnum opus, Vespro della Beata Vergine. The purveyors of early music took the view that there existed an authentic and original method for performing Bach’s works, and everything else was false and without credit. What Toscanini, Klemperer and Stokowski were doing was not art, but murder.

TIME TRAVEL, WITH NONCONFORMIST FERVOUR The Netherlands, a small country with a substantial cultural past where the government supported the arts generously, was at the forefront of the early music movement. There were two routes taken by rebellious classical musicians: those who played renaissance and baroque music, and those who chose the avant-garde. On 17 November 1969, protestors of the “counterculture” broke into the main hall of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and

interrupted a concert of the resident symphony orchestra in protest at its narrow repertoire. This was the infamous Notenkrakersactie – which was originally meant as a statement for new music, but from which historical performers eventually profited more. “Early music was an underground activity then: we played in small venues to audiences with long hair like us, being against everything you had to be against, like war in Vietnam,” Koopman recalled in one interview. “I don’t think we expected it to grow into the movement it is now.”

The other focal point was Belgium’s Flemishspeaking region of Flanders, where those urging change criticized the old establishment with similar youthful fervour. In Ghent a group of musicians paraded to the biggest classical music festival with a coffin, symbolising that bourgeois culture was dead. It was in Flanders that the careers of Paul Van Nevel and René Jacobs began, as did that of Philippe Herreweghe, of course.

Naturally, the purists – as the proponents of the historical performance practice are often described – carried on a lively debate over the details of authentic performance. Looking back, the differences are at least as conspicuous as the similarities. Eventually, as is fitting, audience tastes determined the success of the early music movement. “Forget about involved philosophies of the Zeitgeist and changing perceptions and what a composer might have wanted,” wrote The New York Times’ critic in 1987. “Original-instrument performances in the proper repertory simply sound better than their ‘traditional’ modern equivalents.”

PARALLEL BIOGRAPHIES “I am a church musician, always have been,” confesses Koopman, who – unlike many early music pioneers – did not move on to the Romantic and modern repertoire in the latter half of his career, but stayed with Bach and the Baroque. “In later music there’s no room for a harpsichordist, and I don’t want to just stand up and conduct. I like to be a musician among musicians,” he told one interviewer. As a child, he was so fascinated by the sound of the harpsichord that he used to put pins on the hammers of the piano at home to get the desired sound. As a student at the conservatory in Amsterdam, he was reprimanded for writing in 17th–18th century style for composition classes, but the practice served him well when reconstructing Bach’s St Mark Passion from surviving outlines.

(A recording of his version appeared in 2000.)

At the end of the 1960s, Koopman met Herreweghe, their first joint project being a performance of the St John Passion in Ghent. They took to the stage in jeans, while the choir rocked and swayed as they sang.

A local paper dubbed the production “unchristian.”

Koopman’s harpsichord and organ recordings, as well as the albums he recorded with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra he founded in 1979, are now regarded as benchmarks. “When I started to strike

15

Philippe Herreweghe | Photo: Wouter Maeckelberghe

16

out on my own (…) it was a special treat to see anyone actually hold an authentic instrument,” Koopman told the Budapest Spring Festival magazine in 2020. “Today many young people all over the world study historical performance practice at university level. Not just the technique, but the language too. They understand the Baroque beyond just the rules, and are able to play from the heart. I can choose from many more outstanding musicians than fifty years ago.”

Herreweghe attended a Jesuit school, and was conducting a choir at the age of 14. He prepared to be a psychiatrist, but also studied piano, founding the initially 12-member ensemble Collegium Vocale Gent in 1970. He was the kind of rebel who had a portrait of Gustav Leonhardt, not Jimi Hendrix, hanging on his bedroom wall; it proved a turn of fate when Leonhardt himself, with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, invited him to join them in recording the complete Bach cantatas. For Herreweghe, early music is more about a visceral desire for expression and the search for novelty. On one memorable occasion, his ensemble’s performance of the St John Passion was accompanied, just as in Bach’s day, by a sermon, but here the theme was the inhumanity of the Vietnam War. He declares his belief that “early music is not to be restored, but to be created.”

In 1977, Herreweghe founded another ensemble, La Chapelle Royale, and as he moved into his forties, he adopted Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven into his repertoire, and later Schumann, Brahms and Mahler.

Now into his seventies, he says early music now takes up only one fifth of his time. But it can also happen that after conducting the St Matthew Passion at 17 concerts in 17 days, he still has not had his fill: after all, “you can’t get tired of such good music.”

FOCUS ON BACH Although historical performance has brought many forgotten composers and works back into the public eye, most early music performers will name Bach as the composer they hold most dear. Enthusiasm for Bach was ignited anew with the early music renaissance – though it is not as if his name was ever forgotten, and we know that unwritten tradition tends to exaggerate the significance of rediscovery efforts by Mendelssohn or Pablo Casals. Even so, the way his music is performed has certainly changed. Period instruments have brought a lighter sound and more rapid tempos.

Faithfulness to historical period has and always will have its critics, and though we know more and more about how renaissance and baroque music might have sounded in its time, it will always be up to musicians and audiences to decide what they feel is authentic. One Bach anecdote has him say of his own organ playing: “There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.”

MÁTÉ CSABAI

8 April | 7.30 pm Liszt Academy – Grand Hall

COLLEGIUM VOCALE GENT Bach: St Matthew Passion, BWV 244 Evangelist: Reinoud Van Mechelen Jesus: Florian Boesch Featuring: Dorothee Mields, Grace Davidson – soprano, Tim Mead, James Hall – countertenor, Samuel Boden, Guy Cutting – tenor, Peter Kooij, Tobias Berndt – bass Conductor: Philippe Herreweghe

16 April | 7.30 pm Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

TON KOOPMAN AND THE AMSTERDAM BAROQUE ORCHESTRA Bach: Mass in B minor, BWV 232 Featuring: Elisabeth Breuer – soprano, Maarten Engeltjes – alto, Tilman Lichdi – tenor, Klaus Mertens – bass, Amsterdam Baroque Choir

Guided tours in English for individual visitors • Optional miniconcert available • No registration needed • For students and over-65s we offer 50%

17

discount of the full price • Ticket purchase: Liszt Academy Ticket Office (1061 Budapest, 8 Liszt Ferenc square)

Bence Vági | Photo: Bálint Hirling

Extremely personal In Hungary, audiences got to know the genre of contemporary circus thanks primarily to Recirquel, which was the first – other than star touring troupes from abroad – to dazzle the Hungarian public with productions of outstanding quality. Recirquel work for years preparing their shows – which are usually premièred at Müpa, but also performed regularly in guest appearances abroad, such as in Paris and New York – and each production remains on their repertoire for a long time. It is said that seeing one will get you hooked forever. These days, Recirquel’s founder and artistic director Bence Vági devotes his energies to cirque danse, a hybrid performing art blending elements of ballet, contemporary dance and circus. A complex performance that explores new dimensions, the latest Recirquel production, entitled IMA has also been conceived in this spirit.

18

“The idea for IMA occurred to me during the pandemic. My starting point was that after the stressful period of the pandemic, it’s important to find a way out, and the faith and strength to move on,” Vági explains. One goal of the performance, to which end it uses special lighting and sound effects, is to remove the viewer from the everyday reality of physical existence. All this creates a unique atmosphere around the movement of the performers, giving rise to the title of the piece.

“We’d like to show that there exists a place where everyone can go beyond themselves. Just as in our productions, My Land, Solus Amor or Non Solus, it is important for the audience to look at themselves, their surroundings and their lives differently, through what they’ve seen. Our new production elevates this to a new level of perception: the IMA

installation evokes the atmosphere of sacred places, creating a space in which the viewer, breaking with the bonds of physical existence, can embark on a spiritual journey. The soul can find itself here.”

The rehearsal process for IMA was unusual in that this one-man show – performed at the Bartók Spring by the members of the company in rotation – demanded a greater degree of concentration than before. Vági worked with each performer one-on-one, together creating sequences of movements – or “choreographies of the soul” – that suggest intimacy and are intended to speak to the viewer. While IMA is clearly an extension of the cirque danse genre, it also fits organically into the range of the company’s most recent productions.

This extraordinarily intimate approach certainly counts as a novel experiment even in the decidedly

progressive world of contemporary circus. “I discussed my ideas with each artist in turn, and we gave each other feedback during the rehearsal process as well. In this way, we were able to create a situation of immediacy where I could see in even the tiniest vibrations of the performers what needed to be adjusted; what to keep and what to leave out. This extremely personal creative process helped each performer to be present with their whole being, and to be able to convey the meaning of IMA,” Vági says in describing the details.

Another special feature of the performance is the venue itself, which this time is outside the walls of Müpa Budapest. It is not the first time Recirquel has performed in the huge marquee erected next to the main building; an earlier production, Kristály, was also created for this space and has enjoyed four successful winter seasons so far. In a certain respect, the company’s new piece continues on the path begun with the winter circus story in the genre of immersive theatre, the distinctive feature of which is that the audience becomes part of the performance environment, so that their experience derives primarily from the many different stimuli that surround them, and thus ultimately from within themselves. “From the first moment it was clear to me that we’d find the perfect form for IMA in the world of immersive theatre and visual art,” Vági notes. “An important characteristic of this form is that it creates, in a unique way, a medium in which the viewer or visitor can attain a rare state of sensual awareness and consciousness.” There is even greater scope here for interdisciplinary creative work, where the visual and lighting design, music and sound effects together generate the experience of floating in the airy space of the IMA installation, and where the viewers can feel almost as if they are flying with the artistes.

“Music is an indispensable part of the show,” Vági stresses. “We worked with IMA’s composer Edina Mókus Szirtes and sound designer Gábor Terjék for months to ensure that the music and sound complete the 360-degree visual experience of the audience. Stage design and visuals are a key element in all of our performances – if possible, we’ve placed even greater emphasis on this here.

We conceived and created the IMA installation with our technical director Tamás Vladár; lighting plays a particularly important role, and here lighting designer Attila Lenzsér has lent a new dimension to the performance space. In an immersive theatrical

space that evokes infinity, it’s essential that the players become one with the visual world of the performance, and costume designer Emese Kasza has created costumes to help achieve this.” In the case of IMA, the performance starts as soon as you arrive, with the lobby created in collaboration with Árpád Iványi. “For me the creative process is always a total artistic activity, where the various disciplines are not separate but form an organic whole to create the miracle of performance,” Vági concludes.

With its new production conceived for the Bartók Spring, the world-conquering Hungarian contemporary circus company arrives at a fresh milestone in its ten-year history. We hope that IMA – like Recirquel’s previous shows – will go on to be seen at numerous festivals around the world in the wake of its Müpa premiere.

NIKOLETT VERMES

1, 4–8 and 11–14 April | 7 pm and 8.30 pm 2–3, 9–10 and 15 April | 4 pm, 5.30 pm, 7 pm, 8.30 pm Müpa Budapest – Tent

RECIRQUEL BUDAPEST: IMA – premiere Music: Edina Mókus Szirtes IMA installation: Bence Vági, Tamás Vladár Lobby design: Árpád Iványi Costumes: Emese Kasza Sound: Gábor Terjék Lighting: Attila Lenzsér Flight designer, technical director: Tamás Vladár Creative assistant to the director: Kristóf Várnagy Assistant to the director: Aliz Schlecht Choreographer, director: Bence Vági

19

Anthony Roth Costanzo | Photo: Matthew Placek

“We all use the falsetto register” AN INTERVIEW WITH OPERA SINGER ANTHONY ROTH COSTANZO As a child, Anthony Roth Costanzo performed in Broadway musicals, and once sang backup for Michael Jackson; as a countertenor, however, he has long been the centre of attention. He speaks with enthusiasm about the contemporary opera that changed his life, Japanese kabuki theatre, and the filmmaker he regards as his mentor. He also touches on the operation that might easily have ended his singing career, and a Hungarianspeaking great-grandmother who taught him her recipe for paprika chicken. We spoke with the worldrenowned countertenor by phone from New York.

Can I assume that it’s unusual for an opera singer to start their career in Broadway musicals?

Absolutely. But I like to think of opera as theatre, and so it was a wonderful way to get really grounded in theatre and focus on dramatic expression, which I think is at the core of vocal music, and opera in particular.

You last sang in a musical when you were eleven.

Was it a smooth transition into the world of opera?

I did Broadway for two or three years, and then someone asked me to sing in Benjamin Britten’s opera, The Turn of the Screw. I was captivated by the world of opera. I started as a boy soprano, but my voice began to change. At the time I had no idea what a countertenor was, but things changed quickly.

Was it during this time that you were a backup singer for Michael Jackson?

When I was about twelve, I got asked to sing backup for one of his songs. It was fascinating to observe him doing his work. It was just one song we sang, and I don’t even remember what it was because we had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. But I have the CD he signed for me, so I know it really happened.

Probably the biggest obstacle you faced as a singer was your surgery more than ten years ago. Did you have a concrete plan B in case something went wrong?

It’s hard to know, but when you have thyroid cancer, the thyroid is on top of all your vocal nerves and they have to take it out to get rid of the cancer. It’s sort of like taking chewing gum out of hair: if they cut anything underneath the thyroid as they’re taking it out, it can affect the way you sing or speak because those nerves control all the functions. But that made me really think about what was important to me in making art and in singing, and that’s communication.

I know that there are so many different ways to communicate and facilitate art that go beyond singing. My work as an artist goes far beyond just singing and performing; it’s about how I can engage

audiences and reinvent the art form. I was only 25 or 26, so I don’t think I had a concrete plan B, but I’ve always been involved in producing things, in creating things, and I knew that creativity would always be there even if I couldn’t sing in the same way.

Both your parents were psychologists. Was there any pressure to follow in their footsteps?

There was no pressure whatsoever, they were incredibly supportive. But they did instil one thing, which is they wanted me to study the entire world, not just music, not just the focus of a conservatory.

So I went to Princeton University, where I was exposed to lots of different kinds of academic engagement, and I think that served me really well.

Anthony Roth Costanzo Turning 40 this year, the American countertenor and producer Anthony Roth Costanzo began his career as a child performer in musicals on New York’s Broadway.

He graduated in 2004 with a degree in music magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University, where he has since been invited to teach regularly. As an opera singer he is a returning guest of the world’s leading opera companies – among others the Metropolitan Opera, the English National Opera and Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

He has given memorable performances in the roles of Apollo (in Britten’s Death in Venice), the Angel (in Kaija Saariaho’s Only the Sound Remains), Akhnaten (in the Philip Glass opera of the same name) and Prince Go-Go (in Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre). In 2019, he was named Vocalist of the Year by Musical America, while his solo album of works by Philip Glass and Handel was nominated for a Grammy Award.

21

1.

Everything from ethics to philosophy to computer science… then of course history and literature and gender studies: all the different things that have played a role in what I’ve been able to create.

During your years at Princeton University you wrote a show about a fictional castrato. How did this come about?

I did a show that took the lost and forgotten music of the castrati and wove it together with spoken dialogue and dance. It was thrilling to combine different disciplines, to take this forgotten music and create a new form, and do it with an academic underpinning. Subsequently we made a documentary about that which went to the Cannes Film Festival and played on our arts channel PBS here in the United States.

22

What’s your fascination with the world of the castrati? Is it a tragic world for you, or just a world to explore historically?

It’s the foundation of everything I sing. I’m fascinated with the fact that opera – all of opera – was born of the castrati, these castrated male singers.

To understand what their life was and how they fit into society gives you a whole perspective on the history of music, on expression, on this idea of art being a part of the body. They were kind of the rock

stars of their era: as well as the sadness and the pain they experienced, some of them became huge stars. And we see the shadows of those stars in our pop stars today; whether it’s Prince or Michael Jackson, or Justin Timberlake and Justin Bieber, who use a high falsetto to sing.

So whose music is closer to you, Justin Timberlake’s or Justin Bieber’s?

I don’t know that I’m particularly close to either of them, but I think we share a vocal approach and a falsetto tone every now and then! If I had to pick a Justin, it’d be my current collaborator Justin Vivian Bond, who’s an incredible cabaret performer.

You appeared in a Japanese kabuki theatre production in Kyoto. Is it easy to fit into these different genres, these different worlds of performing?

I don’t think it was easy, and I’m not after easy, I’m after interesting. And so it was fascinating to work together, and it was one of the most revelatory experiences of my career: to see how their classical art form functioned, how they made it, how it interacted with their audiences, and think about that in comparison to our Western opera, and the fact that it began at about the same time kabuki did.

So what can you tell us about the cabaret performance you did recently?

I have a new album that just came out [Only an Octave Apart, with Justin Vivian Bond], and out of that album we made a show. It looked at all different kinds of things like gender and sexuality through the lens of music. I had so much fun exploring the exhilaration that comes from other kinds of music, whether it’s jazz or pop or cabaret, and finding the connections with classical music. And I think it’s engaged a different and younger audience, but it’s also reinforced the beauty and excitement we can have about classical music.

You’re associated with quite extravagant performances. One in particular was the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten, where you appeared naked. Another was The Double Life of Zefirino, where you wore this extravagant costume designed by the Oscar-winning film director James Ivory.

Both have been a big part of my history. James Ivory taught me about art, light, cinema, dance, all kinds of things, and has become a big mentor of mine.

I appeared in his film A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, and I learned a tremendous amount about acting that I still use in opera. Akhnaten changed the trajectory of my life, because it was such a success but it was also such an artistic and fulfilling experience.

You have a special training method as an opera singer using mental images. What images will you conjure in preparing for your concert in Budapest?

There are all kinds of mental images that I’ve cultivated over the years for my vocal technique. So you might think of a flower opening on a high note in order to give it a kind of sonic bloom. But, that said, I like to respond to the sounds of the orchestra and the feeling of the place. I’ve never been to Hungary, and I’m really excited to come for the first time as my mother’s family came from Hungary to the United States. My great-grandmother, who I met, spoke Hungarian, and she passed on one of her recipes for chicken paprikás to me.

GÁBOR KÖVES

1. Anthony Roth Costanzo in Philip Glass' opera, Akhnaten at Metropoltan Opera | Photo: Richard Hubert Smith

7 April | 7.30 pm Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

ANTHONY ROTH COSTANZO (voice) AND THE ORFEO ORCHESTRA Works by Handel and Gluck Featuring: Réka Kristóf, Ágnes Pintér – soprano, Purcell Choir Conductor: György Vashegyi

ƨƲƂƵŬȘƐǀ ɳ ƌŬŹƂŸƨƨƜȘŹƨƢȥZƲƂƵŬƐŬǕ

23

Branford Marsalis Quartet | Photo: Eric Ryan Anderson

Dialogue in jazz DISCOVERING THE UNKNOWN We have the technology to tailor the rhythm of listening to music to our own listening tastes and to get used to every note of the music. The music industry itself relies on proven structures and routine, with a familiar world of melodies that can be followed from memory encouraging comfortable engagement.

In this dimension, we want to hear the same thing over and again, knowing precisely what to expect of the sounds we hear. In another dimension, on the other hand, we do not want to hear what is coming in advance, but seek music that evolves from unexpected turns and the challenges that musicians set for each other, generated by shifting dialogues among musicians, and between musicians and the audience.

24

The unfamiliar or the habitual? As with concerts of classical music, where generally the audience sits down with the expectation of hearing familiar works, predictability also characterizes jazz – only differently. Jazz offers space for larger deviations and detours, more readily departing from the closed realm of scored composition, fixed idioms and short, safe improvisation.

“In the case of so-called ‘bandstand jazz,’ you have to produce really good music […] good music of the kind that the audience listens to for the intimate musical experience itself,” wrote András Pernye in 1964, going on in the same article to relate an anecdote about Bartók as an occasional listener to jazz.

After so many attempts made in the history

of music, we might try to define what jazz actually is, and the role of collective playing in the genre. There is something “essential” in jazz that can be grasped, the distinctive feature that actually explains why we love it: its spontaneity, which at certain points makes it entirely impossible to predict what path the music will take, not only for the audience but for the musicians themselves. Unpredictability is not a feature of every jazz experience, and yet what is unique to jazz is its freely changing improvisation, the extemporization – displayed especially in musical dialogues – which mainstream classical music appears to have largely lost (an observation not true of contemporary music), and to which popular music styles find it hard to adapt.

The spontaneity of jazz gains truly unexpected

momentum when musicians engage in a dialogue.

This is the kind of spontaneous playing that will be thrust into the spotlight at several concerts of the Bartók Spring. Uri Caine’s Bartók Project, a collaborative effort with Hungarian musicians, and the performance of the Branford Marsalis Quartet and its Hungarian guests, among them Sára Tímár, Mihály Borbély and Soma Salamon, serve to illuminate the generic, communal and chamber music qualities of jazz and folk music from many perspectives, opening up space for collective and spontaneous playing. They probe the symphonic form, the dominance of wind instruments and sound spaces beyond them, the potentials of improvised and composed music.

They also open the way for an interpretation of the Bartókian tradition that serves to irreversibly upset the – culturally and societally contingent – hierarchy that exists between classical and popular music, between folk music and jazz, and thus between the musicians who work in the individual styles.

encouraging the search for new solutions.

Curiosity demands to know how one of the world’s most sought-after jazz groups will interpret Hungarian folk music in the company of local musicians; how a Philadelphia pianist will approach Bartók, and how European and American musicians with different musical roots can play together.

This curiosity is driven and nourished by the shared experience of encountering the unknown.

A glance at the CVs of the performers reveals a roll-call of some of the leading jazz musicians of our time – if a single “bar” of each musician is infused into another’s every time they play together, music becomes the carrier and creator of musical communities through its constant movement.

SÁRA WAGNER

CONSTANT AND CHANGING Three-time Grammy Award-winning saxophonist Branford Marsalis is at home not only in mainstream jazz, but also in popular, film and baroque music alike. At his Budapest concert, the audience has the chance to hear an interpretation by his quartet and their Hungarian guests of a work in several movements, close to an hour in length, which employs Hungarian folk music motifs and is in part brought to life on Hungarian folk instruments.

With their diverse nationalities and genres, a kind of jazz “cosmopolitanism” permeates these events, representing a meeting of different musical languages that establishes a capital of jazz open to every style, sound and interpretation.

FAMILIAR OR UNREPEATABLE In the world of jazz, if the genre is difficult to define, the origins of a work are even harder to establish, just as it is to decide whether the musicians are creating something new when they master a jazz standard and interpret it in their own musical idiom. Each improvisation is a one-off.

With instinctive playing and changes of rhythm or tone, the musicians constantly lead each other down new paths. “The music tell us what to play,” says Philadelphian drummer Justin Faulkner, a member of the Branford Marsalis Quartet since the age of 18. Whether performing “acquired” or freshly improvised music, they create jointly and bounce musical ideas back and forth.

The music is guided by the shared breath of a quartet whose members know each other’s playing inside out. This is one kind of jazz. Another is when unexplored musical sounds meet and mutually inspire, when musicians teach each other new languages. This presents new challenges,

2 April | 8 pm Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

BRANFORD MARSALIS AND FRIENDS Featuring: Sára Tímár – voice, János Lang, Miklós Király – violin, Kornél Varga – guitar, Mihály Borbély – tárogató, saxophone, Soma Salamon – accordion, recorder, Balázs Szokolay Dongó – pipe, Branford Marsalis Quartet Members of the quartet: Branford Marsalis – saxophone, Joey Calderazzo – piano, Eric Revis – double bass, Justin Faulkner – drums

10 April | 8 pm Müpa Budapest – Festival Theatre

URI CAINE: BARTÓK PROJECT Featuring: Petra Várallyay – violin, Chris Speed – saxophone, clarinet, Uri Caine – piano, Miklós Lukács – cimbalom, Mátyás Szandai – double bass, Jim Black – drums

25

1.

From the Tisza to Sidi Zarzour BÉLA BARTÓK’S TRIP TO NORTH AFRICA It is well known that Béla Bartók, one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, was also active as an ethnomusicologist, exploring not only Hungarian folk music but the music of other peoples living in territories of the one-time Kingdom of Hungary. What is far less well-known, however, is that the scope of his fieldwork extended to lands beyond Europe. Illustrating the significance of his trip to North Africa in June 1913, he was the first ethnomusicologist to collect music on site (sometimes with support from the police) during a visit to the continent. In 1932, as a highly respected expert on the subject, he took part in the First Congress of Arab Music in Cairo.

26

Bartók began to collect and study Hungarian folk music around 1905, Slovakian the following year, and Romanian in 1909. From the beginning he was interested in comparing the folklore of various peoples, and he soon conceived the idea of expanding his fieldwork to more distant territories. In 1912, he recounted the following to Béla Balázs, his librettist for Bluebeard’s Castle: “when [in the spring of 1906] I travelled as Ferenc Vecsey’s piano accompanist on a concert tour in Spain, I had the opportunity to make a short excursion to the African coast. There, in a small Arab café, I heard very interesting folk music sung in Arabic. Since then I have held fast the hope of more closely examining it.”

References to his trip to North Africa first appeared in Bartók’s correspondence in the summer of 1911. According to a letter he wrote on 9 July from Munich to the wife of Ion Buşiţia, a teacher at the Romanian Unitarian secondary school in Belényes (Beiuș) who accompanied him on a field trip to Bihar County, he was on his way to Paris to study “Arab folk songs.” He stayed in the French capital from 11 to 23 June, from where he wrote to his wife, Márta Ziegler that he had purchased an ArabicFrench dictionary and a book of Arabic grammar, but had not found any collection of Arab folk songs. In the same letter he revealed to his wife his plan to travel to Africa the following summer.

Organising a trip of this kind from Hungary was

certainly no easy task at that time. As a first step, Bartók submitted an application to the Hungarian culture ministry for assistance in acquiring an official letter of recommendation to the Algerian authorities from the French Ministry of the Interior, but this petition proved unsuccessful until the last minute. Eventually Kálmán d’Isoz, the secretary of the Hungarian National Museum, together with Paris-based Hungarian composer Géza Vilmos Zágon, helped him overcome the numerous administrative obstacles.

Bartók departed for North Africa with his wife on 31 May 1913. On 4 June they arrived in Marseille, where Bartók took delivery of phonographic cylinders pre-ordered from the Berlin Phonogram Archive, before travelling on by sea the next day to Philippeville (now Skikda). From there they journeyed some 200 kilometres south to the site of Bartók’s research, the city of Biskra on the Sidi Zarzour watercourse, as well as the three surrounding oases of Sidi Okba, Tolga and El-Kantara. From 11 June onwards, the composer gathered material continuously for two weeks. “The sheiks were most obliging; they simply ordered people to come in and sing. One very striking thing: there was no trace of shame in these people, not even the women. In a few places, by the way, I collected songs from women under ‘police supervision,’ since respectable women are not permitted to converse with strange men,” Bartók recalled in October of that year to Ion Birlea, the Romanian pastor who accompanied him on his trip to Máramaros (Maramureș).

In contrast to the methods he employed on field

trips in the Carpathian Basin, on this occasion Bartók recorded the entire collection using his Edison phonograph. Although he would later also write down notations for each recording, these were largely only indicative aides-mémoire. The choice of method was partly due to the unfamiliarity of the music (notation of which was a task that had to be resolved separately), and partly to the very high proportion of instrumental or instrumentally accompanied performances among the collected material compared to those featuring only a single, unaccompanied vocal part. On 19 June 1913, when he recounted his impressions to Géza Vilmos Zágon, he dwelt on the latter phenomenon: “The Arabs accompany almost all their songs with percussion instruments, sometimes in a very complicated rhythm (where chiefly varying accentuations of equal bar lengths produce different rhythmic patterns). This is the most pronounced difference between their singing and ours. Apart from this, there are many primitive melodies (confined to three adjoining notes of the scale), and the compass of a fifth is hardly ever exceeded.

None of their original string instruments have survived (they have the violin instead), while their wind instruments have quite peculiar scales.”

Bartók found the African heat intolerable, and had to cut his trip short for health reasons. On 24 June he had to travel to Algiers for medical treatment, but injured his leg there and was only able to return to Europe around ten days later.

Despite all these difficulties, by October he was already making plans for further travels to North Africa, intending his trip of June 2013 to be merely

Hungarian State Folk Ensemble | Photo: Szilvia Csibi / Müpa Budapest

27

Ballet Company of Győr | Photo: Szilvia Csibi / Müpa Budapest

28

the start. However, the outbreak of the world war in the summer of 1914 prevented him from continuing, and then circumstances in the wake of the war made such journeys impossible.

Although Bartók’s field trip to Algeria turned out to be shorter than planned, its results were still highly significant. The composer returned with no fewer than 118 phonographic cylinders (comprising some five hours of sound recordings), and carefully transcribed a large part of this material. In tandem with the recordings, he also completed 37 pages of on-site notes; in what came to be known as the “Arab field book,” he recorded musical motifs, rhythm patterns and data pertaining to performers, genres and instruments.

While Bartók was not the first to delve into the Arab folk music of North Africa, his trip blazed a trail for a number of reasons. He was the first among the pioneers of modern ethnomusicology to collect African music in situ, meaning that – unlike many of his distinguished German colleagues – he did not rely on material recorded by others.

In this way, he had the opportunity to examine not only performance styles, but also folk customs, social situations and religious traditions.

He took a remarkably methodological approach to gathering entirely alien research material, for example making several recordings on which the solo instrument, accompanying drum rhythm and sung part were well separated, sometimes by pointing the phonograph horn towards one

or the other, and sometimes by having each “part” performed in turn. One important achievement of Bartók’s scholarship was that, by adapting a basic idea of folk music research in Hungary to regions of North Africa, he was the first to draw a clear distinction between Arab urban and peasant music.

Two versions of Bartók’s essay on his field trip to Algeria were published. He intended to publish the original Hungarian-language draft in the Budapest periodical Szimfónia. However, after the first part appeared in the September 1917 issue, the journal ceased publication. The full version of the essay was published in German in 1920 in the Leipzig magazine Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft, with 65 engraved transcriptions, many of which were in the form of musical scores (that is, containing percussion parts attached to the melodies). It should be noted that Bartók, as is known from his correspondence with Zagon, had first thought of a French edition (given that Algeria had been a French protectorate since 1830), but this did not materialise.

The published accounts of his research in North Africa elevated Bartók to the status of one of the foremost experts on Arab folk music. Given that the three westernmost countries of the North African coast – Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia – can be regarded as an ethnic unity, his study serves as a model not only for researchers of Algerian folk music, but also for those of its Tunisian and Moroccan counterparts. It is no coincidence that in 1932 he was invited to the first

international congress on Arab music in Cairo, while in 1936 he collected folk music in Anatolia at the invitation of the Turkish government.

Bartók often incorporated popular melodies, cadences and musical structures organically into his own works. He took a similar approach to ideas gleaned from Arab folk music, taking an interest not only in the primitive ostinato rhythms of its percussion parts, but also in its frequent use of virtuosic polymetry. The influence of Arab folk music is also apparent in certain melodic choices, such as the tone set and the sinuous melodic lines.

Bartók himself referred to his use of sources from his North African collection, though he only mentioned two works by name: the third movement of his 1916 Suite (Op. 14) for piano, and the first and fourth movements of his 1923 Dance Suite.

Nevertheless, the influence of Arab music is clearly discernible in many other instances: in the second movement of String Quartet No. 2 (1915–1917), the second movement of Piano Concerto No. 1 (1926), the third movement of Piano Concerto No. 2 (1930–1931), No. 42 (“Arabian Dance”) of the 44 Duos for Two Violins (1931), and No. 58 (“In Oriental Style”) of Mikrokosmos (1926–1939). Arab influences are also revealed in the fugato of The Miraculous Mandarin, and in the theme of String Quartet No. 4 (1928) that plays an important role in both the opening and closing movements.

ZSOMBOR NÉMETH The author is a music historian and research fellow at the Bartók Archives, Institute for Musicology – Research Centre for the Humanities

1. The Hindemith, Jenő Takács and Béla Bartók at the Pyramid of Djoser (1932) | Photo: Jenő Takács HUNGART © 2022 | The photo is provided by the Bartók Archives, Institute for Musicology – Research Centre for the Humanities.

8 April | 7.30 pm Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

PURE SOURCE An evening of arts based on Bartók’s Hungarian and Arabic collections Featuring: Guessous Mesi – voice, László Szlama – recorder, cither, voice, Gerzson Dávid Boros – darbuka, bendir, voice, Tamás Smuk – tapan, Ballet Company of Győr, Hungarian State Folk Ensemble, Kodály Philharmonic Debrecen Conductor: Kornél Fekete-Kovács, Imre Kollár Music: Kornél Fekete-Kovács, Péter Erdélyi Music editor: László Gőz, István Szalonna Pál Animation: László Zsolt Bordos Choreographer: György Ágfalvi, Gábor Mihályi, László Velekei Director: Csaba Káel

WE BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF DANCE

www.tancszinhaz.hu

29

2.

11 April | 7.30 pm Budapest Music Center – Concert Hall 1.

9 April | 10 am Museum of Fine Arts

Between Heaven and Hell: The Enigmatic World of Hieronymus Bosch THE UNIVERSAL BOSCH If aesthetic value could be measured, or if it made sense for art to compete against art, then Hieronymus Bosch would win the highest marks. Despite this, the work of the Netherlandish genius, born in the second half of the 15th century as the scion of a great painting dynasty, was almost totally forgotten for centuries after his death.

The mystery enshrouding Bosch and his works dissipated thanks to the admiration of the Surrealists, and today he is seen as one of the most influential painters of his time – a world champion, if you like.

Besides his place in the history of art, one aspect of the afterlife of Bosch’s œuvre is that no other artist’s work has decorated the covers of popular music records as often as his unique, incomparable imagery (from Depeche Mode to Dead Can Dance, and from Michael Jackson to Deep Purple, hundreds of albums owe him a visual debt).

Even so, a life’s work of such inestimable impact is relatively scant, comprising barely two dozen surviving paintings. In truth, this is one selling point of the exhibition Between Heaven and Hell: The Enigmatic World of Hieronymus Bosch at the Museum of Fine Arts, since eleven of his works – almost half of the extant total – will feature at the exhibition under the banner of the Bartók Spring.

The show is the largest display of Bosch’s art ever put on in Central Europe, and one of the most important Bosch exhibitions of the past half-century anywhere in the international museum world. Besides the master’s own paintings and drawings, the exhibition of close to 90 works also includes works regarded as antecedents of his œuvre, as well as masterpieces from Bosch’s workshop and his followers.

All this offers a cross-section of an age that compels us to confront eternal human themes, ourselves and the questions we seek to answer.

The exhibition is on view between 9 April and 17 July.

30

1. Hieronymus Bosch: Last Judgement (middle panel, detail), cca 1515 © Musea Brugge | Photo: Dominique Provost 2. Photo: Andrej Grilc 3. Photo: James Bort / Warner Classics 4. Source: Hungarian State Folk Ensemble 5. Source: Hungarian State Opera

Signum Saxophone Quartet BOLD AS BRASS Founded in Cologne in 2006, the Signum Saxophone Quartet have already been guests at Müpa, as part of the Rising Stars series of concerts in 2015, and the Hungarian audience most recently had the chance to hear them play at last summer’s KaposFest music festival. Half the original line-up of Signum – Slovenian founding members Blaž Kemperle and Alan Lužar – still travels the world with the quartet, now together with the saxophones of Hayrapet Arakelyan and Guerino Bellarosa. What has not changed – and what Signum has certainly never done by halves – is to bring its members’ incessant blend of virtuosity, playfulness and unbridled yearning for freedom to the stage, coupled with a pinpoint sense of drama and the dreamlike sonic texture, almost reminiscent of the sound of a string quartet, that they produce with masterful creativity. This holds true whatever they play, from Bach to Bartók, and from a composition

by Steve Reich to the Recitation Book of the late David Maslanka, which was composed in the year of the quartet’s foundation.

4.

3.

14 April | 7.30 pm Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

17 April | 7 pm Müpa Budapest – Béla Bartók National Concert Hall

David Fray (piano) and the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra

Hungarian State Folk Ensemble: His Cross Blossomed Dance drama for the feast of Easter

A TRIUMVIRATE OF TALENTS “A remarkable artist, rich in ideas and with stunning instrumental skill,” whose debut in Budapest was a “genuine celebration,” wrote a reviewer after David Fray’s first performance in Hungary, a solo recital in 2013. The following year the French pianist returned to us in partnership with the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra (LFKZ).

Still only 40 years old, Fray thus already has a well-established and cordial relationship with both the Hungarian public and the LFKZ, although as a performer of Beethoven we have only heard him play the Piano Concerto in B-flat major until now. While he is celebrated primarily as an interpreter of Bach, we now have the chance to measure Fray’s similarly well-developed sense for the music of Beethoven with a new programme of works.

On this occasion, following his performance of the Piano Concerto in C minor as soloist, he will join in for the Triple Concerto in C major, playing the keyboard part originally written for Archduke Rudolf of Austria. Given that his partners in the performance of the work will be violinist Kristóf Baráti and cellist István Várdai, it is a triumvirate that promises a triumph.

EASTER RITUALS, PRAYERS AND FOLK SONGS Easter carries special significance in Christianity and folk custom alike, and it is from this that the dance ensemble and orchestra of the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble draws for the dance performance, His Cross Blossomed.

Directed by Gábor Mihályi, the production features noted singers and instrumentalists, as well as the Saint Ephraim Men’s Choir, which marks its 20th anniversary this year. The show is based on the liturgies of various denominations and ancient peasant customs from across the entire Carpathian Basin. Easter customs associated with both Christianity and the Pagan period – originating from numerous regions of the Carpathian Basin, among them the Székely Land, former Upper Hungary and the Southern Great Plain – are interwoven in a unified dramatic form. Along with the dance traditions, the show makes use of a diverse and rich musical material, embracing archaic folk prayers, chants and folk songs that evoke the time before the adoption of Christianity, religious folk melodies, dance music and church hymns linked to prominent days in the calendar (from Roman Catholic, Protestant and Greek Catholic tradition alike).

5.

17 April | 5 pm Hungarian State Opera

Wagner: Parsifal WAGNER THE “CHURCH COUNSELLOR” In a letter written around the time he composed Parsifal, Richard Wagner referred to himself self-ironically in this way, indicating how his last musical work for the stage had come closer than any of his previous operas to the meanings and gestures of religious ceremony and sacred ritual. So much so that on completion of the work, he emphatically – and by then without a trace of irony – had it removed for decades from the profane bulk of the opera repertoire, proclaiming: “It is impossible to permit Parsifal – given that its plot touches directly on the mysteries of the Christian faith – to be included on the opera programmes of our theatres.” The work Wagner called a Bühnenweihfestspiel, or Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage, now appears at the Bartók Spring – and simultaneously returns to the repertoire of the Hungarian State Opera – under the direction of András AlmásiTóth, conducted by Balázs Kocsár and with the 18 symbol indicating a performance for adults only.

In the title role of the saintly fool and compassionate sage is the Franz Liszt Prize awardwinner tenor István Kovácsházi, who sang the title role of the Lohengrin production of the Budapest Wagner Days at Müpa.

31

Liraz | Photo: Ronen Fadida

32

Music for the eyes Since the dawn of talking pictures, movies have evolved hand in hand with music. Our informative trip through time takes us from a star of musicals dancing on the ceiling to the twilight of the radio star spelled by Music Television; from the groundbreaking video of a zombie Michael Jackson moonwalking to TikTok, the defining platform of our age; all this, plus a series of musical shorts to be screened during April at Budapest Ritmo.

BURSTING INTO SONG IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION The first feature-length film with partly synchronised sound, albeit also partly silent, was The Jazz Singer in 1927; the following year’s The Singing Fool (again starring Al Jolson) was even screened in Budapest. The 1930s saw the introduction of musical short features of a few minutes in length.

The Golden Age of the film musical is associated with the time of the Great Depression, partly because stars and writers quit the closed theatres for Hollywood, and partly – as the British critic Martin Chilton puts it – because the genre represents “the embodiment of escapism,” where there is no need to explain why a character bursts into song. “In a musical, nothing dreadful ever happens,” says the main character, played by Björk, in Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (an assertion that is of course to be negated in the film).

Although Fred Astaire famously said that “either the camera will dance, or I will,” the more inventive directors of musicals exploited the technological innovations of the age. Astaire himself dances on the walls and ceiling in Royal Wedding (1951) because in reality the room is revolving – and the camera with it. While The Wizard of Oz and Singing in the Rain are the most renowned creations of the Golden Age, every decade has its classics because, when the stars align, the impacts of film

Ayom

and music are mutually reinforcing. For example, Attila Damokos, director of one of the Budapest Ritmo films in 2021, says that Jesus Christ Superstar and Pink Floyd: The Wall played a major part in his decision to embark on a career in film.

Today the genre of music and dance is enjoying a renaissance: in 2021, Steven Spielberg (West Side Story), Leos Carax (Annette) and Broadway star Lin-Manuel Miranda (Tick, Tick… Boom!) all directed film musicals. Many have noted that there may be similar reasons for this revival as with the genre’s first Golden Age, which likewise took place against the backdrop of a global crisis.

If not in musicals in the strict sense, Elvis Presley and the Beatles also exploited the marketing potential of films. And let us not forget concert films, whose directors have included big names like Martin Scorsese, whose The Last Waltz is regarded by many as the best in the genre.

I WANT MY MTV From the 1960s onwards, short promotional videos for musical programmes became increasingly common. The first of these to make a truly big impact was Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975, filmed when it was realised how ridiculous it would be for the band to just mime through such a complex song. (Many regard this as the first true music video.) Even so, the future managers of Music Television were greeted with incomprehension when they broached the idea of a channel exclusively showing music videos. Eventually, MTV started broadcasting on 1st August 1981 with the video for Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star – echoing the recurring warning in the music industry that the new media format would put an end to the old.

Today we remember MTV in its heyday as a dominant force shaping youth culture, but it wasn’t plain sailing from the start. The big push was provided by Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger with the I Want My MTV ad campaign: he was so impressed by the cheek of the proposal that he agreed to do it for one dollar.

Under the influence of MTV, pop music and visuals became more closely intertwined than ever before: consider but Madonna, whose career would be unimaginable without her famous (or infamous) videos. Illustrating MTV’s impact, Michael Jackson’s revolutionary Thriller video, though it came out one year after the release of the album, led

33

Kalàscima | Photo: Daniele Met

to a significant boost in sales. (Jackson and director John Landis were also pioneers of the “making of” documentary genre: essentially the shooting of the video was retroactively financed from TV sales of this behind-the-scenes film.)

MTV also impacted the world of movies: rapid edits and other tricks in the style of music videos came to define a genre in cinema, launching the movie careers of top directors like David Fincher, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze.

grew tired of this. Within a very short time a new genre evolved which, as Damokos explains, still does not have a name: “The band plays live, with room for improvisation too, but coupled with such rich visual stimuli that it seems like a music video.” While Damokos mentions videos

by The Weeknd, this unique blend of video and concert-like performance could also be seen in Studio 2054, Dua Lipa’s live stream concert.

The new style is not without precedents, notes director Fanni Szilágyi: at the 2013 YouTube Music Awards gala, Spike Jonze directed a performance of Arcade Fire that took the form of a live video with the participation of actress Greta Gerwig.

The organisers of Budapest Ritmo also believe that streamed concerts are no replacement for the experience of live music, and chose instead a cinematic quality. In 2021, Attila Damokos, Gábor Karcis and Fanni Szilágyi, as well as Bálint Szimler and Gábor Reisz, took a variety of approaches in making short films of the Dresch String Quartet, Odd ID and MORDÁI performing live, and adapted to film music previously recorded by Károly Cserepes.

In 2022, the performers were selected through a competition, with the short films to be screened in the Toldi Cinema under the Bartók Spring banner.

A STORY EVOLVING THROUGH MUSIC

FREEDOM AND MEMES

34

The internet, above all the launch of YouTube in 2005, brought a transformation not only in technology but in content as well. “When we watched videos on MTV, it seemed a very free approach to visuals. But YouTube brought an even bolder visual approach, which didn’t conform to any rules and did great things for video,” says Attila Damokos. It also dissolved the old generic divides still separating performance videos from concept videos or those that tell a story.

YouTube also created new genres: elaborate but seemingly amateur videos (of which OK Go are true masters), fan montages, lyric videos and more. The success of these viral videos often influences directors, who attempt to compose scenes that will end up as memes.

The leading platform in recent years has been TikTok, where we find a visual approach unlike anything seen before. So-called viral success here is achieved when a great many users respond to a challenge or make their own versions of a meme.

While this can also be boosted deliberately, what is sure is that consumers themselves are becoming increasingly conscious content creators, dictating a rapid rhythm with which the music industry often struggles to keep up. The platform’s visual language also has an impact on music, as in the example of Olivia Rodrigo, who purposely wrote a part into her hit Drivers License to which users can create popular video transformations on TikTok. At the start of the pandemic musicians streamed themselves live from home, but the world soon

For some time projection has been an indispensable extra at popular music concerts, albeit often only as a fleeting attraction – with rare exceptions such as U2’s Zoo TV Tour. Similar to this is VJing,

Amadou & Mariam | Photo: Julio Bandit

which is mainly typical of electronic music parties.

Gábor Karcis, who emerged from this scene, used mapping techniques in the film he made to the music of Károly Cserepes, projecting not onto a flat surface, but onto the stones and plants of Budapest’s Botanical Gardens. The technology, which is based on modelling complex surfaces and “distorting” the image projected thereon, has undergone major development in the past few years. The creative potential inherent in another technical advance has also been deployed in film: namely, animation that reacts to music in real time. The moving image is generated by a code, but can also be controlled by visual artists not necessarily proficient in programming.

A lesser-known trend in VJing is live cinema, which adopts a more narrative form than an ordinary projection, telling a story that is not predetermined, but evolves with the music. Karcis highlights the work of The Light Surgeons in this genre.

WAR OF THE VIRTUAL WORLDS Finally it is worth mentioning a hybrid sphere that is beginning to take shape. We see an increasing number of concerts in which the star (or their likeness or avatar) appears in the world of a popular online game (for example, Fortnite, Minecraft or Roblox). These are often grandiose, sometimes wild and surreal visual orgies, with various degrees of active involvement on the part of the spectator (or player). If predictions prove accurate and the age of the metaverse is soon upon us, then we can expect a great deal more innovation and experimentation in this field.

THE LARGEST TERRACE IN BUDAPEST

ANDRÁS RÓNAI

3 DANCEFLOORS

7–10 April Szimpla Kert / Akvárium Klub / Toldi

BUDAPEST RITMO Wonders to hear

FOOD-DRINK

35

AKVÁRIUM KLUB • BUDAPEST, ERZSÉBET TÉR 12.

WWW.AKVARIUMKLUB.HU • f /AKVARIUMKLUB T /AKVARIUMKLUB • /AKVARIUMKLUB

Circa: Sacre | Photo: Pedro Greig

An enthralling rite of spring It pays to be prepared: this show of world-renowned Australian contemporary circus company Circa is not exactly entertainment of the light variety. At times we’ll barely dare breathe seeing the seemingly death-defying stunts; at other times, we’ll be unsettled by the tragedy quietly unfolding on stage, based on Stravinsky’s legendary ballet music. We may need to dive into the depths of our emotions, without a lifeline or a safety net. In return, this amazing performance is certain to remain an experience that stays with us long after the curtain has fallen.

36

In the 1970s and 1980s, it was still seen as a novel idea for circus to be performed on the same stages that host musical or dance productions, or straight theatre in particular. Today, however, contemporary circus is recognised as an independent genre in its own right, with home-grown purveyors in Hungary and international troupes often visiting here as well. One of the latter is Circa, formed in Brisbane and active on the scene now for 18 years.

“NOW THAT’S REALLY WAY OVER THE TOP!” Of the three pillars on which Circa’s show rests – poetic tenderness, raw emotion and physical strength – it is perhaps the latter that is the most obvious.

Founder Yaron Lifschitz describes the company as “extremely talented, fantastically trained young men and women who know that they will wake up with a lifetime of physical pain and will be unable

to stretch or bend over properly in the morning.”

Lifschitz summarises Circa’s work as “the art form of the actual.” And there is a huge amount at stake in this actuality. The artists are not acting out the danger, but genuinely living it; not merely showing off their strength, but going to extremes in terms of their physical condition and endurance.

Contemporary circus is a genre in which the audience can instantly sense if anything is fake, and it is perhaps precisely for this reason that the performers of Circa push their authenticity, total effort and commitment to the limits. A fitting illustration of the effect of this is a scene Tamás Jászay described in his 2016 review: “‘Jesus Christ, now that’s really way over the top!’ cried out an audience member when a female artist, having bent her body into the most impossible poses, all at once stood up, took her male colleague up on her shoulders, and then held both of them balancing on the tips of her ballet shoes.”

RAW EMOTIONS, OPENLY EXPOSED The contemporary circus represented by Circa differs in many respects from other genres of physical theatre, such as classical or contemporary dance. The latter entails choreography and a rhythm to be followed, the creative goal generally being to ensure the audience sees only sterile perfection while the underlying effort remains hidden behind the scenes. In contrast, Circa consciously exposes this effort and integrates it into the artistic performance itself, while following no specific choreography or fixed rhythm. Some of their performances are based on improvisation to such a degree that Lifschitz likens it directly to jazz.

And that is just one of a great many points of contact between Circa and music. It is part of their avowed mission to provide both a theatrical and a musical experience for those buying tickets to their shows, and to familiarise the audience with unusual, sometimes rarely heard musical works. When acrobats are exposed to the power of classical music, they can transpose it to their own theatrical dimension with incredible intensity. They have already done so with the works of Shostakovich, Beethoven and English baroque composers, among others, while also remaining open to other genres: their adaptations also include a Shaun the Sheep musical and Mike Oldfield’s album, Tubular Bells.

impresarios that the work had incited a near-riot in Paris – a legend that, though unsubstantiated, still persists. The story, as the subtitle, Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts suggests, is about pagan rituals celebrating the advent of spring, and climaxes in the ritual sacrifice of a young girl (or her ritual suicide – depending on the point of view).

Circa’s version of Stravinsky’s work returns to the unvarnished truth of the piece and its emotions, which intensify to the point of pain, to which contemporary composer Philippe Bachmann adds his own contribution. The two musical works – separated by more than a century – combine with the performance of the circus artists to produce an overall effect that we might perhaps only compare to the sultriness of jazz and the expressive power of poetry. This is the kind of opportunity Lifschitz might have sensed when he quit his career as a theatre director at the turn of the millennium. He later said of his decision: “I think theatre got enslaved by literature; it’s been taught to be about a bunch of themes and ideas. I knew it wasn’t my calling.”

Circa’s unparalleled levels of activity seems to bear evidence to just how good a decision that was: the company puts on as many as eight to ten new shows a year. The huge amount of productions that spring from Lifschitz’s ideas appears to indicate that the artistic director certainly isn’t short of things to say – except that he doesn’t wish to convey them through verbal means. In other words, if we want to feel, fall, flex and fly with Circa, we’ll need to go along and see the latest performance of the Australian company live in Budapest.

ZSÓFIA HACSEK

PAGAN BELIEFS AND FABRICATED SCANDAL One of the foundations of the show, Sacre is Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, originally written by the Russian composer for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: at the 1913 premiere, the dancers of the company performed to choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky against a stage set designed by Nicholas Roerich. The work was so innovative that a legend spread from the pens of overseas

17 April | 7 pm Müpa Budapest – Festival Theatre

CIRCA: SACRE Music: Philippe Bachman, Igor Stravinsky Costumes: Libby McDonnell Lighting: Veronique Bennett Director: Yaron Lifschitz

37

1.

Secession: birth of a Hungarian style of architecture Over the course of its history, Hungarian architecture has converged with the cutting edge in Europe on a number of occasions. Esztergom Castle Hill was the site of the first Gothic vault outside France and the first Renaissance central square north of Italy. In the 19th century, the Empire and Classicist styles soon made an appearance in Hungary, while the Historicist buildings of Pest remain among the finest examples of the style to this day. However, the first Hungarian architectural trend to assume a truly national character – as it did in many other countries – was Secession.

38

The two-decade period from the 1890s until the outbreak of the First World War saw numerous masterpieces built in Hungary (which was then considerably larger than it is today). In reality, the Secessionist (Art Nouveau) style did not dominate anywhere in terms of the number of buildings, as historicism continued to be the prevailing trend in most major Hungarian cities. Even so, the houses that were erected in this style were so striking and iconic that they sometimes lent a new character to an entire urban landscape, especially in the Great Plain region. Kecskemét, Szeged, Szabadka (Subotica) and Nagyvárad (Oradea) remain

outstanding centres of Hungarian Secession to this day, despite the fact that the style is represented in only a small portion of their architectural heritage.

A COLLECTION OF SECESSIONIST TRENDS But what exactly was Hungarian Secession? One of its distinctive traits – if one can call it that – was diversity. Budapest was a city expanding at a frenetic pace, where artists and their clients arrived from lands far and wide. Well-travelled architects had a penchant for applying their knowledge gleaned abroad in Hungary, so the country would come to

represent the full range of European Art Nouveau movements in miniature, with its many national styles.

The other “twin capital” of Austria-Hungary was Vienna, and so it was only natural for Vienna Secession to take root in Budapest as well. Examples of the style are the Körhinta in City Park, the building housing a historic carousel that still functions today, or the residential and office buildings on Szabadság Square that now house the Embassy of the United States. As an interesting footnote in architectural history, Budapest also has a building designed by the world-famous master of the style, Otto Wagner, in the form of the Rumbach Street Synagogue, although this is representative of the romantic Moorish Revival, rather than the Secessionist style.

Besides the Vienna Secession, we also find influences in Hungary of the French and Belgian Art Nouveau, the German Jugendstil, the Italian Stile Liberty, the British Arts and Crafts movement, and the National Romantic style of Northern Europe. It is also true that very few buildings can be assigned unequivocally to any one style, most displaying a blend of various influences. One example is the Liszt Academy designed by Flóris Korb and Kálmán Giergl, one of the finest and best-preserved memorials to Hungarian Secession. Although many elements of its style – meeting the expectations of its commissioners – are eclectic, the whole is permeated by the Vienna Secession, while the building also displays oriental motifs and the visible influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in its frescoes.

EASTERN HERITAGE Hungarian Secession is notable not only for this diversity, however. The greatest Hungarian master of the style, Ödön Lechner, tried to create a national formal idiom that was distinctly Hungarian.

Though he did not fully succeed, what he did create remains unmistakably “Lechneresque.”

Reflecting oriental influences, his exuberant buildings can be most readily compared to the works of Antoni Gaudí. While he may have been familiar with the work of the master of Catalan Modernisme, Lechner trod his own path in shaping the style of architecture he is now known for.

For a long time, Lechner worked renovating Renaissance châteaux in France. Returning home and starting an architecture firm with Gyula Pártos, he initially applied the experience he had gained abroad to the design of buildings in the historicist style. One of these was the Budapest HQ of worldrenowned furniture maker Thonet, a forerunner of Secession in Hungary. High points of the individual style he developed over the ensuing decades include Budapest’s Museum of Applied Arts, the Royal Postal Savings Bank and the Hungarian Geological Institute. The curious reader may admire Lechner’s extraordinary designs on the façade of the Deutsch Palace in Szeged, a minute’s walk from the Bartók Spring venue at the National Theatre.

Besides the patterns derived from Hungarian folk art, Lechner also favoured Persian and Indian motifs. While exotic decorative elements were typical of Art Nouveau in general, for Lechner they meant more. In the era of National Romanticism, interest in the origins of the Magyars grew, with many claiming to detect traces of our ancestors in vanished Eastern empires.

Lechner never taught at university, and yet he created a school, and many young architects sought to emulate his style. Among his staunchest acolytes were Marcell Komor and Dezső Jakab, who started by working in Lechner’s office before striking out on their own to design numerous public buildings in Hungary. Departing somewhat 2.

39

in the so-called “crenellated Renaissance” style, before turning towards neoclassicism and Modernism. He was not alone in searching for a national architecture elsewhere than the Orient.

3.

THE DISCOVERY OF FOLK ARCHITECTURE

from Asian stylistic features, their emphasis was more on Hungarian motifs. Among their finest works are the city hall and synagogue in Szabadka (Subotica), and the city hall and Palace of Culture in Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș).

Similarly decorated buildings can be found all over the country. These new buildings, more imposing and richly decorated than their predecessors, were often called “fancy palaces” (cifrapalota), an epithet that stuck so firmly to the one-time casino building in Kecskemét that it is still known by this name – and not only by locals.

DECORATED HOUSES

40

Zsolnay ceramics were indispensable ingredients of this “fanciness.” Vilmos Zsolnay was both a talented ceramicist and a successful industrialist.

The ceramics factory in Pécs – located on a site that once covered some five hectares, close to the Kodály Centre that serves as the Pécs venue of the Bartók Spring – turned out products that we find all across the territory of the former Kingdom of Hungary, and not only on Secessionist buildings, but on the Matthias Church or the Hungarian Parliament as well. Moreover, the factory’s heyday, its compelling experiments and the invention of its own eosin ceramic glaze precisely coincided with the spread of the colourful new Secessionist style. And although it is true that ceramics were regarded by many as a cheap substitute for stone components, it is almost impossible to imagine Lechner’s most famous buildings or the works of his followers without Zsolnay ceramics.

Lechner’s most talented pupil was Béla Lajta, who in the course of his short career came a long way from his master’s style. Yet, even his pre-modern buildings, like the Rózsavölgyi House in Budapest, have folk art decorations.

Interestingly, Lechner’s own family gave another talented artist to the nation, his nephew, Jenő Kismarty-Lechner. Quickly breaking from his uncle’s oriental Secessionist style, he first sought to discover the roots of Hungarian architecture

Most Art Nouveau trends attached great importance to ornamentation, façades, interior decoration, and colourful crestings of varying forms.

At the same time, the generation of architects appearing at the turn of the 20th century sought renewal and their Hungarian roots elsewhere.

A group of young architects led by Károly Kós turned towards Transylvanian folk architecture, as they did not wish to renew the medium simply by decorating ordinary houses with folk elements. They attempted to apply the way old peasant houses or mediaeval manors handled mass to the design of buildings that met modern needs. This led to some fascinating solutions, mainly for structures with functions completely different from the traditional.

At Budapest Zoo, for example, Kós and Dezső Zrumeczky designed an aviary which resembles a Transylvanian church. Perhaps even more exciting are public institutions such as the Székely National Museum in the Transylvanian town of Sepsiszentgyörgy (Sfântu Gheorghe), or the school in Városmajor Street in Budapest, designed with Dénes Györgyi. Here, the architects succeeded in their attempt to adapt the forms of small houses to much larger buildings.

Their work was not without precedents. Contemporary Finnish architecture, in its search for its roots, as well as the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, influenced them in many ways – not only in their rediscovery of traditional architectural forms but also in their approach, which held that architecture should not be disconnected from other branches of art. Kós himself was at once a graphic artist, book and furniture designer, writer and teacher.

4.

5.

Among adherents of Kós, many simply copied his approach, or folk architecture in general, but others set off on their own path. For example, István Medgyaszay, who is best known for the Petőfi Theatre in Veszprém, originated a style that aimed to unite Lechner’s oriental formal idiom with the folkloristic style of the Kós school. He did so while setting these architectural trends on entirely new foundations with his patents for reinforced concrete. However, with Medgyaszay we bid farewell to the Hungarian Secession. As a student of Otto Wagner, he came into direct contact with the roots of the style, but he also put an end to it with his early Modernist and Art Deco buildings.

DÁVID ZUBRECZKI

1. Museum of Fine Arts, designed by Ödön Lechner and Gyula Pártos (1893–1896) 2. Rumbach Street Synagogue, designed by Otto Wagner (1869–1872) Photo: János Posztós 3. Royal Postal Savings Bank, designed by Ödön Lechner and Sándor Baumgarten (1900–1901) 4. Grand Hall of Liszt Academy, relief by Ede Telcs (1907) Photo: János Posztós 5. City Hall in Marosvásárhely (Târgu Mureș), designed by Marcell Komor and Dezső Jakab (1905–1907)

11 April | 11 am Hungarian National Gallery

ART DECO BUDAPEST Posters, objects, spaces (1925–1938)

41

The exhibition is on view between 12 April and 28 August.

www.bmcrecords.hu Ministry of Human Capacities

info@bmc.hu

Csaba Káel | Photo: Szilvia Csibi / Müpa Budapest

“Let’s rediscover our beautiful cities!”

A CONVERSATION WITH CSABA KÁEL, CEO OF MÜPA BUDAPEST In 2022, Müpa Budapest stages its Bartók Spring International Arts Weeks for the second time, after last year’s inaugural festival took place in the form of online broadcasts, owing to the coronavirus pandemic.

This means that this year’s edition will be the first Bartók Spring to present performances to live audiences, and also the first to offer programmes not only in Budapest, but in other cities across the country as well.

We spoke with Müpa’s CEO Csaba Káel about the new goals of the expanded nationwide series of events, his relationship to the festival’s namesake and the wide diversity of genres on offer.

42

The festival bears the name of Béla Bartók, but doesn’t focus exclusively on the composer’s œuvre. How does the Bartók concept manifest itself in the spirit of the festival?

Béla Bartók not only sets us an example with his art, but provides the key – to use a phrase in current parlance – to the sustainable development of culture, since it’s vital for us to be able to pass on our cultural values to future generations. Bartók’s legacy urges us to explore our roots and their inherent values in order to define our identity through the filter of

our own existence. When we started to put this new festival together, we not only sought the means to assemble a programme with global stars, but we also had specific goals in terms of content. The Bartók Spring is not meant to be a festival that evokes the past, but one that aims to showcase Bartók’s legacy through the work of today’s creative artists. It’s very important that we also include the visual arts, such as the group of artists known as The Eight who moved in circles contemporaneous with Bartók.

This year’s important innovation is the transformation of the Bartók Spring into a nationwide festival with events outside Budapest. What’s more, several productions – such as the performances of opera singer Ramón Vargas and violinist Sergei Krylov – will only take place outside the capital.

Last year’s Bartók Spring was also unusual in that we invited many of our partners from the country – the Szeged Contemporary Dance Company, the Ballet Pécs, the Ballet Company of Győr and the Hungarian National Dance Ensemble – to present new productions, turning the obstacles thrown up by the pandemic to our own advantage via broadcasts that made performances available to international audiences. It goes without saying that we don’t wish to restrict Bartók’s spirit to Budapest, since the composer himself drew inspiration from Hungarian culture as a whole and his life was not limited to one city. It was in the 20th century, for the first time in its history, that our country found itself “top-heavy” due to the dominance of the capital.

In the past two years – strange as it is to say, courtesy of the pandemic – we’ve begun to rediscover our beautiful cities and provinces, once more bringing closer the regions of Tokaj-Hegyalja, Zselic, the Great Plain and Lake Balaton. So the idea occurs naturally: why not do the same in the planning of the festival? In the first round we contacted cities where the infrastructure is already in place for participation in a major festival, so that this year we’re collaborating with Győr, Miskolc, Debrecen, Szeged and Pécs.

It has already been said that an important task of the Bartók Spring is to create its own productions.

What is the concept behind these performances?

Some of them explicitly draw on Bartók for inspiration in the fields of folk music, jazz, world music, dance and classical music, and are often realised at the intersections of these genres.

At the same time, a few significant episodes in Müpa’s history also play a part, for example the 15th anniversary of our institution’s foundation, an occasion for which we ordered new works from several notable musicians, among them Branford Marsalis. In 2020 we announced our Composition Competition, and the Szeged Contemporary Dance Company created choreographies for two of the award winners. Pure Source, our production created for the Hungarian day of the World Expo in Dubai this year, can be first seen at the Bartók Spring.

It focuses on the Carpathian Basin, which is not only a catchment area of rivers but a repository of cultures, which is fed, in a similarly natural way, from pure sources. This idea originates from Bartók, who besides studying the Hungarian folk songs and the cultures of the peoples in the neighbouring countries, and carrying out fieldwork in Turkey, also travelled to Algeria and became one of the first internationally recognised experts on Arab folk music.

It’s striking that the festival is presenting a number of dance productions this year. What’s the reason for this shift?

Dance is an emphatic part of the programme because Müpa Budapest traditionally maintains a profile with a wide variety of genres, and because we find this form of expression inherently exciting for its evocation of that ancient state when humanity’s physical and spiritual existence still formed an inseparable whole. Dance is practiced in many entirely different styles, and for this reason we endeavoured to represent this diversity when assembling the festival programme: besides folk dance productions, it also features figures from the international scene – including the fantastic Spanish dancer María Pagés – in addition to new self-produced dance performances.

In the non-metropolitan cities, the public will have the chance to see productions that couldn’t be enjoyed live at last year’s festival. Concerto, a Bartók-inspired performance by the Szeged Contemporary Dance Company, is unusual in that it’s based on a Bartók work for which the composer didn’t create choreography, while the Ballet Pécs’s Vasarely Études is connected to Pécs-born painter Victor Vasarely. The broad spectrum also includes contemporary circus, where dance is likewise an important element. The Recirquel company presents a new show under the title IMA, while Australian contemporary circus troupe Circa’s production Sacre is also eagerly anticipated. Aerial dance company BANDALOOP has already performed physical theatre on buildings in several locations in Budapest, and on this occasion we’ll have them dance on famous buildings outside the capital – I sincerely hope to everyone’s utmost delight and amazement!

ENDRE TÓTH

21–28 April

BARTÓK SPRING MISKOLC 22 April – 9 May

BARTÓK SPRING GYŐR 27 April – 5 May

BARTÓK SPRING DEBRECEN

43

Bartók Spring Magazine Volume 2, April, 2022 A free publication of the Bartók Spring International Arts Weeks

Published by Papageno Consulting Ltd. on behalf of Müpa Budapest Founded by: Müpa Budapest Nonprofit Ltd. Csaba Káel, CEO Publisher: Managing director of Papageno Consulting Ltd. E-mail: szerkesztoseg@papageno.hu Editor-in-chief: Marcell Németh Publication manager: Bernadett Lukács With contributions from: Máté Csabai, Endre Dömötör, Zsófia Hacsek, Tamás Jászay, Gábor Köves, Ferenc László, Fanni Molnár, Zsombor Németh, András Rónai, Endre Tóth, Nikolett Vermes, Zoltán Végső, Sára Wagner, Dávid Zubreczki English translation: Stephen Paul Anthony Translation editor: Árpád Mihály Printed by: Pátria Printing House Co. Katalin Orgován, CEO Printed in 2,000 copies Submissions closed on: 4 March, 2022 The organizers reserve the right to make changes.

Bartók Spring International Arts Weeks 1–17 April, 2022 www.bartokspring.hu E-mail: info@bartoktavasz.hu Telephone: +36 1 555 3000

bartokspring.hu

2022

BUDAPEST WAGNER DAYS June 9–22

DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN SONG RECITAL BY RENÉ PAPE RIENZI Corporate partner:

Mupa Budapest is supported by the Ministry of Human Capacities

mupa.hu

bartokspring.hu