Tour: Menuhin Festival Gstaad – Chamber Concert

The last cheerful sound before the world war, bringing harmony to a seemingly irreconcilable conflict and a groundbreaking string octet: this is the emotional rollercoaster offered by the Budapest Festival Orchestra to audiences in Saanen. A few months after composing his Divertimento, an unimpeded piece invoking also the looming atmosphere of war, Bartók emigrated to America. Iván Fischer reflects on the horrors of that very war, while exploring how, despite all this, we can still admire German culture. The answer is provided, among other things, by Mendelssohn’s piece concluding the concert, which is still a hallmark work in octet literature. In the cantata of Fischer, also the conductor of the concert, the soloists will be Gergely Csikota, the orchestra’s well-traveled trumpet player, and soprano Mirella Hagen, whose voice was praised by Bachtrack as “effortless and ethereal”.

Bartók’s Divertimento is the final piece of a rather extraordinary trilogy: after Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta, and Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, this was the third work ordered by Paul Sacher from Bartók. The leader of Basel Chamber Orchestra even offered an idyllic Alpine retreat for composing, and the piece was completed in just over two weeks. The title itself draws heavily on classical music traditions, but Bartók also paid homage to the past through the form: he combined the genre of concerto grosso, based on a dialogue between the soloists and the orchestra, with his own style. The opening movement built on opposites and contrasts is followed by the adagio foreshadowing the coming war, and the work concludes with a finale that is, for Bartók, unexpectedly cheerful and, of course, Hungarian in character.

Ivan Fischer’s A German-Yiddish Cantata is also based on opposites or, more precisely, a paradox. The composer-conductor discovered in a Jewish cemetery in Budapest that his uncle, Károly Baracs, had a German quotation, from a poem by Goethe, inscribed on his gravestone. “How could a Jewish person possibly admire German poetry after all the horrific deeds of the Germans?” Fischer asked himself. But in addition to the duality of the uncle’s story, the composition also incorporates a poem by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, who recalls how, after his mother’s murder, he slipped into her coat to feel her beloved scent one last time. Horror and poignancy, high culture and traditions meet in this collage for soprano solo, trumpet and orchestra, which draws inspiration from German and Jewish culture, as well as Baroque and folk music styles.

“Clouds go by and mists recede, Bathed in the dawn and blended; Sighs the wind in leaf and reed, And all our tale is ended”, says Goethe’s Faust. According to Fanny, this quote inspired the scherzo of the teenage Felix’s Octet, which, rather than having an odd-meter rhythm, has a symmetrical one, and instead of a ternary form, tends toward sonata form. This masterpiece was the first in its genre that was not merely a doubled string quartet, but had eight independent parts. The piece lies halfway between chamber music and a symphonic work and was an absolute milestone for a composer searching for his own symphonic sound. At the premiere in 1825, the first violin was played by the octet’s dedicatee, Mendelssohn’s teacher, while the composer himself played the second viola part. The bright first movement and the dreamy andante are followed by the scherzo mentioned above, and the piece is concluded with a finale of unstoppable momentum.