This concert, one of the last in the 2024 İKSV Istanbul Music Festival, was also one of those organised within the framework of the ‘Hungarian-Turkish Year of Culture’. Hungarian musicians featured prominently in this year’s events: violinist Kristóf Baráti (a recipient of the Kossuth Prize, his country’s highest cultural award) appeared with the Mantua Chamber Orchestra on May 22, the Roby Lakatos Ensemble played traditional Hungarian gypsy music (together with Turkish kanun-player Hakan Güngör) on May 27, the Hungarian National Choir sang in Mozart’s Requiem with the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra on June 2, and on June 3 the Budapest Festival Orchestra, conducted by Iván Fischer, played works by Brahms including two of his Hungarian Dances.
The concert on June 6 was given by the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra (in Hungarian, ‘Liszt Ferenc Kamarazenekar’), an ensemble founded in 1963 by graduates of the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Their current conductor is Péter Tfirst; directing the proceedings in Istanbul, meanwhile, was cellist István Várdai, their artistic director.
The venue for this event was the İş Towers Hall, located in the İşbank Towers complex. As I made my way northwards along Büyükdere Caddesi from the metro station in 1st Levent, I passed a rather attractive mosque, named after the 16th-century Ottoman sea captain (later Admiral of the Fleet) Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha, that was opened just over a year ago. I then came to a place where gleaming temples of treasure took off into the stratosphere. Cowed by their overweening magnificence, I tentatively passed through a gate, crossed a rather attractive courtyard where there was a pool with a fountain, and entered the concert hall.
The programme on June 6 was a selection of works from different periods; most of them were by composers who were either from Hungary themselves or had a connection of some kind with that country. It began with Béla Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances, jumped back over a century to visit a Mozart piano concerto, fast-forwarded into the 1850s with Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 2, touched base with Republican-era Turkey in the shape of an arrangement of Ulvi Cemal Erkin’s String Quartet, and concluded with pieces by two Jewish musicians from Central Europe: a Hungarian Rhapsody by a Bohemian cellist, and a Hungarian-folk-music-inspired Divertimento (that was my very first triple hyphenation – is that something to celebrate?) by a leading educator of the early 20th century whose pupils included famous conductors Antal Doráti and Georg Solti. Featuring as it did a performance by Turkish piano virtuoso Gülsin Onay, this unusual selection made for an engaging evening’s music.
The first work we heard – Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances – was originally named Romanian Folk Dances from Hungary; it consists of dances from Transylvania, a region that until the end of the First World War was part of Hungary. The Treaty of Trianon, signed in 1920, awarded the whole region to Romania, however, and for years afterwards Hungarian children would pray at school assemblies for this treaty to be revoked. Renaming the work may therefore have given rise to some odd feelings in Bartók, an avid collector of folk songs who in 1910 had travelled all over Transylvania carrying an Edison cylinder recorder and some blank wax rolls.
The Romanian Folk Dances would originally have been played on a fiddle or a shepherd’s pipe. In 1915, Bartók transformed them into a series of six short piano pieces; then, in 1917, he arranged them for orchestra. In this recording, they are being played by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra (leader: Terje Tønnensen).
For the second item, Gülsin Onay took the stage. Launching into Mozart’s three-movement Piano Concerto No 12 in A major, K 414, she nodded in time with the music, obviously relishing every moment. Her playing was tasteful and elegant throughout, but her first solo passage in the slow movement was a special treat, demonstrating as it did her mastery of phrasing. The last movement was so beautifully played that it was difficult to tell who was deriving the most pleasure and satisfaction from it – the musicians or the audience. For her encore, Ms Onay played an atonal-sounding piece by Bartók. When it was over, she began to walk off the stage, and the orchestra started following behind her; however, she turned round and shooed them back to their places so that they could all take another bow together.
In this recording, a youthful Murray Perahia is playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 12 with the English Chamber Orchestra.
After the interval, the music boat travelled back along the Danube from Vienna to Budapest, and we heard the orchestra play Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 2, a perennial favourite. Noteworthy here was the players’ excellent co-ordination, especially in the pizzicato passages. It seemed to me that at this point they began to warm up, preparing themselves for some full-throated, gutsy performances later on in the programme.
Wikipedia’s definition of ‘rhapsody’ is as follows: ‘a one-movement work that is episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, colour, and tonality. An air of spontaneous inspiration and a sense of improvisation make it freer in form than a set of variations.’ We are then told that ‘in the 19th century the rhapsody had become primarily an instrumental form, first for the piano and then, in the second half of the century, a large-scale nationalistic orchestral ‘epic’ – a fashion initiated by Franz Liszt.’
The Hungarian Rhapsodies were a set of 19 piano pieces composed by ‘Liszt Ferenc’ between the late 1840s and early 1850s (sources do not agree as to the exact dates); No 2 was one of six that were subsequently arranged for orchestra by Franz Doppler, a flute virtuoso and composer of ballet music from Lviv, a city that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was known as ‘Lemberg’. It was Liszt himself who had set him this task: Doppler was a pupil of his who had a real talent for orchestration. In fact, Liszt often collaborated with his students in this way – something that gave rise to the mistaken notion that he was incapable of orchestrating his own works.
In this performance, the Hungarian Rhapsody No 2 is being played by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mariss Jansons. This outfit has woodwind and brass sections, so it naturally produces a much more fulsome sound than the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra did on June 6. As a result, the rousing knees-up at the end of the piece might be taken as an invitation to dance the can-can. If feeling compelled to respond to this temptation, however, do exercise some restraint: remove valuable objects from table tops, and avoid kicking partners in their soft parts while cavorting.
Being a tireless critic of the ‘Beşler’ – the five composers of Western-style classical music (Ahmed Adnan Saygun, Ulvi Cemal Erkin, Cemal Reşit Rey, Hasan Ferit Alnar and Necil Kazım Akses) who graced Turkey’s Republican period, and whose works I believe to be massively overrated in their home country – I freely admit that an arrangement for string orchestra of the String Quartet by Ulvi Cemal Erkin (1906-72) was not something I was particularly looking forward to. In the event, I was most pleasantly surprised. In this arrangement, created by the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra itself, Erkin’s four-movement String Quartet (1935-36) proved to have a lot going for it. I have to say, however, that it makes far too much use of the open fourth (the ‘interval’, or space between notes, that you get when you go up – for instance – from C to F) and the open fifth (the wider interval between C and G). In fact, these two intervals bedevilled the work of all Turkish composers of the period, introducing an element of banal primitivism. In the background music to early cowboy films, the Indians were always portrayed by means of open fourths, and one gets tired of endless repetitions of this interval that are not accompanied by the appearance over the hill of a posse of native American warriors brandishing weapons.
These caveats aside, I especially enjoyed the cello solo at the end of the first movement of Erkin’s String Quartet (a movement that – unsurprisingly in view of the fact that its composer spent the years from 1925 to 1930 receiving training in Paris – bears a similarity to the quartets of Debussy and Ravel), and in the second movement the Hungarian orchestra proved to have a good feel for the Turkish rhythms. Open fifths made an unwelcome appearance in the last movement, but I feel I have already said enough on that score (might that be a pun?).
The following performance is by the Borusan String Quartet, to whom all Turkish composers – past and present – who wrote string quartets should be grateful for providing professionally-played performances of their works. In this recording, we hear two former members of the quartet who have now departed from it: second violinist Olgu Kızılay and cellist Çağ Erçağ.
Before beginning the next item on the programme, István Várdai brought one of Ulvi Cemal Erkin’s female descendants (I did not catch her name, unfortunately) onto the stage to receive applause. In a brief speech, he described Erkin’s String Quartet as ‘original’ – and indeed I would largely concur with that judgement, though the excellence of the orchestral arrangement undoubtedly had something to do with the piece’s overall effect. We then heard David Popper’s Hungarian Rhapsody; here, the prominent cello part was played by Mr Várdai, whose skill was amply demonstrated by an impressive solo in the first movement.
The Bohemian-Jewish cellist and composer David Popper (1843-1913) was a well-known figure in his time, giving concerts throughout Europe with his pianist wife Sophie Menter, a pupil of Liszt. It was Liszt, in fact, who recommended him for a teaching position at the Conservatory of Budapest, which opened in 1875 and is now known as the ‘Franz Liszt Academy of Music’. Popper performed chamber music with Brahms on several occasions: for instance, he played the cello in the first performance of the composer’s 1886 Piano Trio No 3 in C minor along with violinist Jenő Hubay, his partner in the Budapest Quartet. He also wrote a large number of pieces for the cello, including four concertos and a book of études for advanced students. His six-movement Hungarian Rhapsody, originally written for piano and cello in 1893 but orchestrated by Max Schlegel in 1897, incorporates special effects such as glissandi and sul ponticello playing (with the bow placed close to the bridge of the instrument); indeed, Popper’s works are considered to have expanded the cello’s range of technical possibilities. Michael-Thomas Foumai, writing on the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra website, tells us the following:
The Hungarian Rhapsody (Ungarische Rhapsodie) is a dazzling showpiece, offering a perspective of skilful idiomatic virtuosity through a Jewish lens of Hungarian folk music. The rhapsodic work channels the Czárdás, a traditional Hungarian dance characterised by fluctuating slow and fast tempi in 2/4 or 4/4. Comparisons with Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and the Hungarian Dances of Brahms are immediate, with some sections sharing similar folk themes.
The following performance is by the National Chamber Orchestra of Armenia, conducted by Juan Antonio Ramirez. The cello part is being played by Narek Hakhnazaryan, whose facial expressions are worth watching.
The final piece on the programme was the Divertimento No 1 by Leó Weiner (1885-1960), a teacher of music theory at the Budapest Academy of Music who later served as professor of composition there (from 1912) and was appointed professor of chamber music in 1920. As noted earlier, his pupils included the celebrated Hungarian-Jewish conductors Antal Doráti (1906-88) and Georg Solti (1912-97). On the subject of Weiner’s compositions, Wikipedia informs us that a ‘conservative Romantic approach formed the basis of his style, to which elements of Hungarian folk music were added sometime later, although he was not an active field researcher of folk music as were his contemporaries Bartók and Kodály, but simply shared an interest in the subject and added elements of folk music into his established harmonic language without significantly changing it.’ Weiner also wrote highly-regarded textbooks on music theory, harmony and musical analysis; as the teacher of many of the finest Hungarian musicians of his time, he is said to have contributed to the establishment of his country as a major centre for the study and performance of classical music.
His output included five divertimenti for orchestra, No 1 having been written in the early 1930s. The work is described by Rob Barnett (on the MusicWeb site) in the following – somewhat colourful – terms: ‘The skirling five movements of the First Divertimento are modelled on Hungarian Dances. The effect is innocent rather than over-gunned, sturdy not overbearing and whirling rather than furious.’ In this performance, Leó Weiner’s Divertimento No 1 in D major for Strings is being played by the Anima Musicae Chamber Orchestra (artistic director: László G. Horváth).
By this time, the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra had well and truly warmed up, and their performance of the Divertimento was (as noted earlier) a full-throated and gutsy one; what particularly impressed me was the way they handled all the numerous changes of tempo without a hitch. When they repeated the lively second movement as an encore, everyone around me in the audience swayed in time with the beat, thus bringing the evening to a euphoric close.
I first witnessed the way traditional Hungarian music stirs the hearts of Turkish people at a concert during the long, hot summer of 1980, when I went to a concert by a Hungarian orchestra (replete with ‘cimbalom’ – a dulcimer with metal strings stretched across a trapezoidal box) at the Open Air Theatre in Harbiye. The cimbalom has a similar sound to the Turkish kanun (a type of zither), and I first came across it when playing the French horn in Zoltán Kodály’s 1927 Háry János Suite (based on an earlier folk opera) at a school concert. For those who don’t know this highly entertaining piece, here is Wikipedia’s summary of the plot:
The story is of a veteran hussar in the Austrian army in the first half of the 19th century who sits in the village inn regaling his listeners with fantastic tales of heroism ... . His supposed exploits include winning the heart of the Empress Marie Louise, the wife of Napoleon, and then single-handedly defeating Napoleon and his armies. Nevertheless, he finally renounces all riches in order to go back to his village with his sweetheart.
The following performance is by the Cleveland Orchestra under the baton of Budapest-born Széll György (otherwise known as George Szell, 1897-1970, regarded as one of the finest conductors of the 20th century). The notes under the YouTube version give you some useful information about the various movements. The cimbalom comes to the fore in the Intermezzo, which starts at 15:12.
