Paul Griffiths

Austerity and Exuberance

Contemporary Music at the Budapest Autumn Festival

 

Where music is concerned, the Budapest Autumn Festival, founded in 1992, is the direct successor to the Contemporary Music Weeks that similarly took place in late October, with the same function of offering a two-way window. New Hungarian music is shown to the world, or at least to a decent number of professional and non-professional visitors, while Budapest audiences - and composers - are exposed to new work from abroad.
This time the big Hungarian event was the premiere, on October 22, of Zoltán Jeney's Funeral Rite, a composition a quarter century in the making, scored for full choral and orchestral forces with vocal soloists plus a concertino percussion quartet (Amadinda), and lasting over three hours. These hours pass slowly, no doubt by design; they hang heavy. The work is a sequence of immense slabs, each uniform in texture and colour, each starting, continuing and stopping. Harmony, as one might expect from this composer, is not a progressive force but static. Perhaps more surprising is the dependence in the vocal writing on plainsong and folk melodies, or on modes and motifs typical of these - not least in the opening 'Motto', which sets a striking allegory by Pilinszky, this being one of many modern or folk poems alternating with the liturgical Latin that provides the bulk of the text.
The scale changes all the time. Latin texts generally call on the full orchestra to accompany the chorus or soloists, whereas some of the other sections are composed for a solo singer with just one instrumentalist (baritone and pizzicato cello in the 'Motto') or a small group (the mezzosoprano Katalin Károlyi and Amadinda in an adagissimo setting of a poem in Italian by Laura Romani). The pace, too, is not unvaried, even if much of the music is slow. Yet Jeney avoids drama. In what may be the longest Requiem ever written, there is no Dies irae. Many of the texts, both ancient and modern, are given as prayers or readings, evenly delivered.
As a consequence, some few excited moments stand out. In three widely separated passages, verses from the psalm De profundis clamavi each time instigate, to those opening words, an image of clam our in which the whole range of the chorus is scanned at lightning speed, from the basses' low D sharp to the sopranos' high C. Not so thrilling but certainly effective is the setting of the Lord's Prayer for men's choir and orchestra in staggered rhythms, producing a stretch of dark haze. There are also touching arrangements of folk laments for solo women's voices with ensembles including cimbalom and percussionists stationed in a balcony.

 

Paul Griffiths
is the author of books on Stravinsky, Bartók, the string quartet and, most recenty, of The Penguin Companion to Classical Music (2004).