Spectacularly Symphonic

What are you going to listen to?

Kurtág

Hungarian composer György Kurtág is not known as an author of major orchestral works; his idiom lies primarily in vocal and ensemble music. As for his compatriot Bartók, the Hungarian language defines his work and music is primarily a form of communication. This is evident in his large-scale piano album for children Játékok: expressive, spontaneous little works that are often a response to other types of music or declamation of text. One of these piano miniatures was dedicated to his good friend András Mihály, a cellist and composer who died in 1993.

Shortly thereafter, when Kurtág wrote a new orchestral work for the Berliner Philharmoniker as composer-in-residence, he turned to this particle from Játékok. The new composition Stele was to be a monument, an epitaph like that on an antique Greek tomb, dedicated to his deceased friend. As the third movement, an orchestration of the piano piece in question, as well as a reminder of Mihály's Cello Concerto, passes by with massive chords like a slow funeral procession. Time is stopped, as it were. Kurtág once described it as a scene from Tolstoy's War and Peace, in which a wounded soldier looking up at the immaculately blue sky feels that that sky is far more essential than all the noise that occupies us in the world.

With the enormous instrumentation (including Wagner tubas, lots of percussion and various keyboard instruments), Kurtág has a rich palette of orchestral colors to employ. The classical opening chord is immediately reminiscent of Beethoven's Leonore overture, once conceived as an introduction to the opera Fidelio. Writer Alex Ross describes the passage in his book The rest is noise as if Kurtág were taking his listeners into the world of Fidelio, descending into the darkness of the dungeon where Florestan awaits his fate in captivity. In Stele, we descend deeper underground with a percussive and agitated second movement that slowly stiffens to the tombstone we are finally left with.

Beethoven

During the time Ludwig van Beethoven was busy making revisions to his Fidelio, he also completed his Fourth Piano Concerto. In 1808, Beethoven played the solo part in a memorable concert at the Theater an der Wien. Just before Christmas, in a theater where the heating had failed, in an endless program of exclusively his own works. He also premiered the Fifthand Sixth Symphonies there. Due to quarrels with orchestra members and soloists and because of his deteriorating hearing, it became a fiasco. According to listeners, Beethoven played terribly fast and orchestra and soloist were regularly out of sync. It became Beethoven's Last performance as a piano soloist.

The music of the Fourth Piano Concerto was particularly surprising to listeners of its time in several ways. Whereas the introduction of the soloist was traditionally introduced by an orchestral passage, here the pianist himself begins. The orchestral response is harmonically equally unexpected, and it takes a long time for orchestra and soloist to achieve symbiosis in their various roles. For this concert, the Beethoven himself wrote several cadences, but the tradition was for each pianist to write or improvise his own cadenza. At today's concert, composer Klaas de Vries stepped into Beethoven's shoes to give his response to the Viennese grand master's surprising and imaginative notes. In an interview with Festival Dag in de Branding , De Vries hinted at how the overall program is intertwined. "I incorporated the pulsating chords of Kurtág's Stele, which has a tonal affinity with Beethoven's piano concerto. And it also includes the first chord of my own Cada Instante. But you almost don't hear that: it stays for a very long time but softly, with the sustain pedal, while over it Beethoven continues as usual."

De Vries

Terneuzen-born composer Klaas de Vries celebrates his eightieth birthday at the Festival Dag in de Branding with a whole weekend of concerts in The Hague, of which this concert is the opening. De Vries drew inspiration for his new composition Cada Instante from a poem by Jose Luis Borges: Doomsday, a reference to John's apocalyptic vision. He read it on the day Russia invaded Ukraine and the text never left him. Borges paints his prophecy as a moment that can also happen here and now, at every moment in every human life. In every heartbeat, in every moment charged like a weapon, the test can take place. Which side are you on then? Are you then Cain or Siddharta?

Playing with this fraught idea is the music of Cada Instante ("every moment"), in which all the senses are constantly alert to what might unfold. In a dimmed hall, expectations and fears are magnified by De Vries as in a psychological experiment. The mostly whispery orchestra, with a leading role for as many as seven percussionists, can erupt suddenly and from unexpected directions.

Frans Boendermaker