The Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra aimed for both ends of the repertoire’s frequency curve when setting the programme together for their 9 November concert at the Academy of Music. The night opened with the most famous piece possible and ended with a rarely performed string orchestra version of a work that has hardly ever been played.
Offering Mozart’s Little Night Music (Serenade in G major, K. 525) on the program takes a lot of courage, with dozens of live and recorded interpretations still ringing in everyone’s ears providing numerous points of reference. The question in such cases is whether the performers can find something new, a different perspective.
The opening Allegro set off crisp and fresh, with so much momentum that the second period saw the parts slip a little, but this was a momentary falter and clearly an exception to the rule of exemplary joint playing. The cheerful, sustained agility of the Menuetto and the final movement was also good to listen to, while the transparency of the elaboration of the concluding Allegro was worthy of note. The desired novelty came in the form of the Romanze: it is not common to encounter such an intimate, confessional movement emerging from the slow movement of a serenade.
The soloist of the evening’s middle piece, Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, was performing in Budapest for the first time. Thirty-year-old Benjamin Grosvenor arrived in the main hall of the Liszt Academy of Budapest as the winner of many, if not countless, prizes, competition victories and all manner of accolades and records, but his entrance to the podium bore no signs of these: the artist entered with a boyish look on his face, with the kind of smugness one sees when the big boys let the little ones have their fun (which observation is all the more fitting for a man who is the youngest of five brothers).
He began the solo with a subtle distance; his precise and expressive performance was lacking personality until the middle Andante when he engaged in an intimate dialogue with the orchestra. In the concluding Presto, which is a serious test of virtuosity, instead of pursuing bravado, he played with unadulterated English understatement: if the solo sounds so light, let the audience believe that it is easy to play.
When it comes to debut guest artists, one can’t formulate any better praise than saying he is looking forward to the musicians’ return following the performance as he simply wants more. For two encores, our wish was immediately granted. The pianist, smiling under the influence of the corroborative drug called standing ovation, first played Liszt’s Dance of the Gnomes (S. 145/2), showing what a cavalcade of colours this bravura of an etude really contains. After the second encore, the audience began to speculate a little, coming to the conclusion with outside help, that the Spanish dance, with its elegiac atmosphere, was the second piece in Alberto Ginastera’s 1937 Argentine dance cycle, Danza de la Moza Donosa (Dance of the Beautiful Maiden).
Artistic Director István Várdai also took the podium during the Mendelssohn concert as a conductor, not forgetting his chamber musician self. With his energetic, Sturm und Drang-like orchestral tone in the outer movements, he never once forced the soloist to play in a strained manner. Not only did Várdai prove to be a conductor with a steady hand, free of violence, but he also found the energy and attention to interpret the concerto with his ensemble according to the taste of his soloist partner, as if the guest was controlling the whole machine.
The rarity remained for the second part of the concert. The composer, Anton Arensky (1861-1906), began as a child prodigy, taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire by Rimsky-Korsakov, whose strong influence is surpassed only by that of Tchaikovsky in the composer’s oeuvre. Rimsky-Korsakov was more or less right when he predicted that under these strong influences, Arensky’s oeuvre would be forgotten as unoriginal art: it is undeniable that his opuses are rarely performed today. (His master attributed Arensky’s death to excessive alcohol consumption and gambling.)
Written in 1894, the year after Tchaikovsky’s death, the three-movement String Quartet No. 2 (Op. 35) is a tribute to his great predecessor. The work provoked extreme upheaval, as Arensky went as far as breaking the centuries-old two-violin, viola, cello configuration of the string quartet, opting for a violin, viola, two-cello ensemble, with an emphasis on the low strings. This makes the music even more elegiac, even more suited to expressing mourning and a liturgical tone, even more ‘Tchaikovskyan’ if you like – nevertheless, there is no shortage of allusions to the idol. The middle movement is a set of variations on a Tchaikovsky song, while it also contains the psalm melody from the beau ideal’s String Quartet No. 3 along different references (the coronation melody in Boris Godunov and Beethoven’s second Razumovsky Quartet). Back in time, the publisher of the quartet was more cautious than the composer himself and had the piece printed with the traditional instrumental layout as well – business is business.
In the string-orchestra transcription of Arensky’s String Quartet (the programme did not mention the name of the transcriber), the special quartet sound was partly lost. Of course, it may not even be possible in this arrangement to achieve the proportion the composer envisaged – when the violas are given one of the cello parts, the original orchestration trouvaille is obviously sacrificed. For this reason, it is logical to consider the orchestral version an independent work of art, without looking back. The Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra handled the piece with extraordinary dexterity; the pianos in the beginning were downright breathtaking, with unisons of unparalleled clarity in the different parts. In general, the transcription was treated with the utmost care. One of the virtues of the orchestral sound was how it managed to evoke a church echoing – isn’t this more pleasant than the acoustics of a truly echoing church?
The applause of the audience slowly coming around was rewarded with a genuine Tchaikovsky piece, the gracefully played Waltz from Serenade for Strings.