To honor the composer’s 60th birthday, the Metrum Ensemble, known for their derring-do in contemporary music, performed an all-Ádám Kondor concert at the Liszt Academy on October 5th. Kondor winks at the art of scrambling what we know, or what we think we know about musical composition.
The program’s title: Arc és álarc (Face and mask) suggested Kondor’s playing hide-and-seek with the structures and stylings of Bach’s and Mozart’s works, via disassembling everything and putting it back together again — often suggesting the American spoofer P.D.Q. Bach’s (aka Peter Schickele) irreverent treatment of the old masters.
These scores were basically written for a quintet, but the instruments they used alternated among seven players. Kondor christened his oeuvres with BWV numbers that denoted such novelties as “The long Journey from Arnstadt to Lübeck,” and the debut of Brandenburg Concerto No. 7, a would-be cantata without singers. Two other scores claimed The Well-Tempered Klavier and The Art of the Fugue, as the source of inspiration.
Kondor’s arrangements remained tonal in the triadic sense, but they also swam through ensuing centuries, borrowing from other composers as well; in essence, creating a patchwork quilt of delightful musical jest. Conductor Lajos Rozmán was the group’s spokesman with some professorial comic characteristics.
Most of the arrangements employed pizzicato as a fundament, delivered by not only strings, but all concerned. This gave a light-hearted feel throughout the continual trade-offs of melodies from one instrument to another, almost like watching a doubles tennis match. Two amusing touches in “The long journey…” were the entrances and exits of the players during the piece, and not everyone ended the various sections in synchronicity — often with one player left alone at the conclusion. Another clever touch was his slicing up the Preludium of the WTC into pieces that he re-stitched together in a segmented stream that used polyrhythms as its fuel.
Instrumentalists Anna Rákóczy (flute), Gergely Kuklis (violin), Kata Koppan (viola), Norbert Hegyi (clarinet), Aranka Szabó (horn), Eszter Agárdi (cello), and Jákob Bettermann managed to keep their seriousness afloat — especially Agárdi, who approached her part with fully-engaged decorum.
The second half of the program featured a mythical “Happy Village Musicians’ Concert” that might have taken place anywhere in Central Europe in the 19th century, and then travels through time, meeting Mahler and Stravinsky along the way. The second movement’s 6/8 dance led to unexpected places while still keeping the rhythmic romp going — a wild party, but with a quizzical ending. The third movement (the most musically compelling, in my opinion), seemed to outline sneaky characters in a drama that develops like an opera. The final section incorporated hints of Dvorak’s mellifluousness with a twist of Berg. It’s the kind of assorted juxtaposed jollity that Charles Ives would have loved.