Tour: Salzburg Festival

Exploring new paths – this is one way to sum up the background to the three pieces offered at the concert. The concert will open with music by Schubert, who, in addition to inventing the genre of German songs – writing more than 600 of them –, after six symphonies arrived at an entirely new orchestral language, even if the piece ultimately remained unfinished. The colorful program will continue with the Bartókian Movement for Viola composed by György Kurtág, who was also searching for his own voice but had not found it just yet. The soloist will be Lawrence Power. The British violist is hailed by the international press for his flexible sound, rich expressive range and captivating rapport with the audience. In the second half of the concert, the titan of the viola will be followed by another titan as the Budapest Festival Orchestra will conclude its guest tour in Salzburg with Mahler’s lengthy palette of emotions, his Symphony No. 1, which was premiered in Budapest.

Although it is referred to as the Unfinished, Symphony No. 8 is actually whole, with two completed grandiose movements. Schubert set to work composing the piece in 1822, at the height of his prowess, but was forced to leave it unfinished when the first signs of his illness, which would later lead to his death, appeared. The piece only premiered some nearly forty years following the death of the composer. The opening theme of the first movement, performed on the low strings, immediately transports the listener to an ominous atmosphere. Later, the somewhat more positive main theme is also interrupted painfully several times; there is only a glimmer of hope at the very end of the movement. The atmosphere of the second movement is even more uncertain. Sensitive ppp (extremely soft) melodies alternate with dramatic outbursts, but the movement – and, thus, the entire piece – ultimately ends on an elevated note.

György Kurtág gained worldwide fame with the unmistakably unique style of his musical miniatures. However, before learning about contemporary Western music in Paris, he had a creative period at home. The final piece of that period was his Viola Concerto, where Kurtág paid tribute to the style of Bartók’s later works and which won him the Erkel Prize in 1954. The work’s tranquil, lyrical first movement is often performed also as a single concert piece. The movement’s basic building block is the characteristic tritone, the devil’s interval as it had been called a few hundred years earlier, of the viola’s main theme.

After Beethoven, writing symphonies could no more be a simple routine. Composers were less inclined to turn to the genre and when they did, the result was numerous sketches, several versions and continuous struggle as manifested in their letters. And the results were also masterpieces, of course. Mahler started to work on his first symphony at the end of 1887. At first, he planned it to be a five-movement symphonic poem with a program. "A symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything”, he wrote to Sibelius. This attitude is reflected in the motifs reaching across the movements and related to one another, the self-references, the stylistic diversions and also the varied instrumentation. The symphony starts with a rather long and slow introduction. Then we gradually arrive from the motif fragments at the main motif of the composition. The deleted “Blumine”, now performed as an independent concert piece, was replaced with an energetic scherzo in the second movement, which is followed by a unique slow movement including a children’s song performed by double bass, klezmer music and a soldier’s march. The piece concludes with a passionate finale, tragic at first, but eventually bringing triumph.