Prairie Winds T
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e h prairie winds t TURBULENT Recorded at Foellinger Great Hall, WINDS Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, MUSIC FROM University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign EASTERN EUROPE on July 6 and 7, 2004 and June 4 and 6, 2005. Engineer: Jon Schoenoff WIND QUINTETS BY György Ligeti Producer: Stephen A. Taylor Ferenc Farkas Publishers: Farkas and Szervánszky (Editio Musica Budapest); Endre Szervánszky Ligeti (B. Schott’s Söhne, Mainz); Pavel Haas Haas (Boosey & Hawkes/Bote & Bock in cooperation with Tempo Praha) WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1193 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 © 2010 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. with a great corpus of works in his catalog, ranging in style from the traditionally melodic to the modernist— TURBULENT WINDS or imbued with the archaic elegance that characterizes his best-known piece, Early Hungarian Dances from MUSIC FROM EASTERN EUROPE the Seventeenth Century. This crystalline five-movement suite reportedly derived from a series of anonymous dance tunes dating from If music and civility are to flourish, Confucius reputedly said, we must first get names right. When it comes to the 1300s to the 1700s: a curtain-raising intrada, a slow dance, a lively shoulder dance, a stately chorea or the vast swath of land and rich diversity of peoples comprising Eastern Europe, however, names are often as circle dance, and a jump or saltarello. These he reworked and inventively scored for various instrumental bewilderingly unstable as quantum particles—or national boundaries. Where, for instance, is Yugoslavia now? groupings, including standard wind quintet—flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon—unifying the whole Czechoslovakia? Old Ruthenia? In the same limbo from which Montenegro and Bosnia recently returned after with his version of a seventeenth-century Hungarian baroque sound. Its radiantly breezy texture, however, decades of official nonexistence? could easily be mistaken for Elizabethan. In a region frequently caught up in the struggles between powerful neighbors and with its own share of internal Though written in 1959, the piece was apparently conceived by Farkas in the 1940s. Perhaps his Roman tensions, this puzzlement of names appears to bear Confucius out—halfway, that is. Civility has certainly had sojourn was still fresh in his mind at the time: the name he gave his composition in Italian, Antiche danze its severe challenges in that corner of the globe. But music has remained remarkably robust, whether on the grand ungheresi, echoes the title of Respighi’s Antiche arie e danze (“Ancient Airs and Dances”), the final suite of orchestral scale or, as the Prairie Winds impressively demonstrate here, within beguilingly intimate chamber realms. which was finished in 1932, not long after Farkas left for more northerly climes. This disk showcases four striking works by key 20th-century composers of Eastern European provenance: Hungarians Ferenc Farkas, György Ligeti and Endre Szervánszky, and the Czech Pavel Haas. One might expect Endre Szervánszky: Wind Quintet No. 1 that the upheavals of empire-demolishing world wars, ethnic devastation, a Cold War that threatened to boil over onto those territories and the Serbo-Croatian conflict of the 1990s would have resulted in nothing but That Endre Szervánszky’s music influenced a younger generation of composers—especially after the late 1950s, murky dirges or militant protest songs. The versatile ensemble from America’s heartland suggests such an when he shifted away from a folk emphasis toward the more esoteric idiom of Schönberg and Webern—is attested expectation to be wholly inaccurate. to by György Kurtág’s 1989 string-quartet tribute, Officium Breve, written in Szervánszky’s memory. That he also left his mark as a humanitarian is attested to by Yad Vashem’s listing him in 1998 as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, for the efforts that he, a Gentile, made to protect Jews during the Second World War. Ferenc Farkas: Early Hungarian Dances from the Seventeenth Century Born in 1911 in Kistétény (now Budatétény, part of Budapest) into an artistically inclined family, Szervánszky Deeply grounded in the Hungarian musical heritage, particularly as embodied by Bartók and Kodály, Ferenc was an orchestral clarinetist for several years before enrolling as a composition student at the Academy of Farkas was something of an internationalist as well. Born in 1905 in Nagykanizsa, near the Croatian border, Music. Following a stint as a radio orchestrator, he eventually chose, like Ferenc Farkas, to couple composing he studied piano in his youth and specialized in composition at Budapest’s Academy of Music. A scholarship with teaching; in fact, he and Farkas were fellow faculty members at the Liszt Academy, where Szervánszky led him to Rome and to classes with Ottorino Respighi; from Italy he moved on to Vienna and Copenhagen, served as a composition professor from 1948 until his death in 1977. Again like Farkas, he twice won the working as a film composer and conductor. Kossuth Prize and was also named Merited Artist of the Hungarian People’s Republic. Returning to Hungary in 1935, Farkas took employment as a teacher of composition, most notably at the Franz While the second of Szervánszky’s two quintets for winds, from 1957, gravitated toward experimentation (risky Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where he taught from 1949 until his retirement in 1975. A two-time winner business, considering the Moscow-backed government’s dislike of such “decadent” artistic expression), his Wind of Hungary’s prestigious Kossuth Prize and knighted by the Italian government, the prolific composer died in 2000, Quintet No. 1 was written in 1953, several years before Soviet tanks crushed Hungary’s gambit for liberalism. With no political or esthetic credo to advance, it exults in sheer openhearted musicality, a bucolic delight. Some have heard in the accented downbeats of the first movement a waggish mimicry of the Hungarian Tame, perhaps, by today’s standards, and just “prehistoric Ligeti,” as he himself later acknowledged, the work language’s unvarying first-syllable stress; that may have been the intent, but the device works even as just a was still too much for the repressive cultural milieu. Nevertheless, in the composer’s words, “during the summer purely melodic motto. That catchy lilt, the antiphonal trills and assertive horn calls and the fleet sixteenth-note of 1956, there was a temporary relaxing of the dictatorship in the Eastern European communist countries. And runs in the outer movements and the scherzo—together with the third movement’s alternation between tenderness so my Six Bagatelles were played in the fall of 1956…under the title Five Bagatelles. The sixth piece was still and tension—all delectably interact to produce a work of instant appeal. prohibited because of all the minor seconds: totalitarian systems don’t like dissonance.” György Ligeti: Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet Pavel Haas: Wind Quintet, Op. 10 Thanks to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, György Ligeti will long be associated with eeriness of cosmic Killed at Auschwitz in 1944 after internment at the Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration camp—where he was proportions; but then, much of his life was unsettled and unsettling. He was born in 1923 to Hungarian- obliged to appear in a notorious propaganda film—the 45-year-old Brno-born Pavel Haas had been one of Jewish parents living in Transylvania, then part of Romania but annexed in 1940 to Hungary at Hitler’s behest. Czechoslovakia’s most promising composers. As a protégé of Leosv Janácvek, he tapped into the legacy of Dvorvak Assigned to a Nazi labor camp, he survived the Holocaust; other family members did not. In Budapest after and Smetana on one hand and Moravian folksong on the other; through Judaism he was familiar with synagogue the war, he studied under Farkas at the Liszt Academy and later taught there, furnishing music that complied chant; and as a child of the brave new century, he was open to fresh sounds, whether Stravinsky or jazz, and with the government’s insistence on socialist utility while privately creating more introspective forms. fresh technologies, such as film and radio. Once the Soviets quashed the Hungarian uprising of 1956, Ligeti moved to Germany, working with Stockhausen, Given his short life, his musical perfectionism and his need, during much of his career, to support himself by then to Austria, where he became a citizen and started producing the multi-textural Beckett-like musical working for his storeowner father and teaching privately, his catalog is understandably small. Vocal works abstractions that gradually lifted him out of poverty and obscurity. He then moved back to Germany, as his dominate, but he also wrote screen and stage scores, a few orchestral pieces, an opera and several chamber music kept evolving in idiosyncratic directions, but maintained a home in Vienna, where in 2006 he died— works. Outstanding among them is his Wind Quintet, written in 1929 and premiered in Brno by its dedicatees, of a malady whose nature has never been formally divulged. the Moravian Wind Quintet, the following year. Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles stem from a 1950 four-hand piano sonatina, which he then recast as the eleven-move- Discreetly revised by Haas’s student and biographer, Lubomír Peduzzi, the four-movement quintet carries an ment Musica ricercata for solo piano—a pivotal composition in which he first began dissecting the function undertow of yearning, most markedly in the keening prayer of the second movement, an interweaving of resolve of rhythm and sonority. This would not be performed until 1969, but soon after completing it, in 1953, he and resignation.