Last night was the first concert - for me - of the new year.
The programme comprised works by Béla Bartók, Dohnányi, Stravinsky and Ligeti - bar Stravinsky, a Hungarian line-up. It
made for was a powerful immersion in a particular modernist idiom, one
inflected by – among other things - romanticism, Magyar folk and jazz. Adrian Adlam started with Bartók’s
monumental four-movement Sonata for solo violin (1943). This piece was written
for Yehudi Menuhin, and tests the technical range of instrument and player to the
limit. The performance was accompanied by the dazzlingly difficult score
projected onto a screen. I am used to following scores at home and on YouTube,
but I haven’t seen it done in this rather cinematic way in a concert hall
before. It certainly worked for me: this
eye-watering stew of dotted rhythms, massed accidentals and oddly shaped
phrases rather magically resolved into patterns we could recognise and follow. Individual
phrases sounded like the improvisation of a moment, in an unpredictable
emotional journey, yet at the same time we were made aware of a rigorous architectural
scheme. Throughout, the work was utterly compelling musically; the technical
brilliance was always a means to an expressive and evocative end.
Peter Cornish (clarinet) followed with Stravinsky’s Three
Pieces for Solo Clarinet (1918), inspired by Sidney Bechet. The Rhapsody in C
Major for piano by Ernö Dohnányi, played by Stepehn Robbings, was much more romantic
and traditionally melodic. György Ligeti’s Ballad and Dance for
violin and clarinet (composed for two violins in 1950) was a short and
energetic exercise in modal counterpoint and flickering dance rhythms. Finally all
three performers joined for more Bartok: his Contrasts for violin, piano and clarinet
was the result of an approach made to the composer by Benny Goodman. Bartók
had to overcome an initial reluctance – he seemed to feel that the instruments
really spoke in different languages – and then wrote a work which actually
brings out these differences rather than resolves them (hence the title).
Clarinetist and violinist both have to change instruments, there are bravura
technical displays crackling away continuously, but what most struck me on a first listening
was the sheer energy and fecundity of the composing. From the opening
Czardas-like chords punched out by violin, through the shifting melodies of
the slow (Pihenö) movement to the rapid yet crystalline Sebes (fast) final
movement the whole work conveyed an irresistible flow of invention. Sophisticated technique – exciting to watch
in itself - brought out energies which
seemed to come from somewhere primal and deeply playful. Modernity as a
rediscovery of the primitive, moving forward by reaching back.
Adrian Adlam has recorded Bartók's sonatas for EigenArt.
