kamara.hu/4 – Wandering

The Grand Hall concert of the Liszt Academy’s chamber music festival conjures up virtually all the characters from the Antal Szerb novel Journey by Moonlight. The programme from Bach to Bartók lays out a good few of the complex emotions boiling in the novel’s characters. The Art of Fugue, the musical equivalent of God’s perfection, order and purity, depicts the figure of Ervin. The fairies of Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy tale world of the Ulpius siblings appear in the scherzo of the Mendelssohn trio featuring the struggle between darkness and light, while the Bartók and Kodály choirs alternately performing late Liszt works depict Mihály continuously corresponding with his home or wandering through Italy, Erzsi who gathers secrets by night, János and many others. Liszt’s works revolve around one of the central themes of the novel, death, and to top it all, Venice is also evoked in La lugubre gondola. Finally, the Bartók piece rounding off the concert hides within it one of the composer’s most beautiful examples of ‘nocturne’.