Beethoven ‘reset’ – Kristóf Baráti and Klára Würtz

From the history of your collaboration, it seems than an accident may play a major role in an artistic career.

Kristóf Baráti: In 2010 a friend invited me to a concert. I set off without having any notion that I would find myself on the podium. I remember that in the interval I was eating a sandwich in the bufé when I heard someone practising the piano part of the Spring Sonata. I was delighted that this piece was going to be performed and I wondered who the violinist might be. I did not suspect that it would be me. Shortly afterwards they called me and asked if I would be willing to play this work. When I asked where and when, they replied: “In twenty minutes, but it would be good if you could run through it a little with the artist first.” Luckily, I had my violin with me.

Klára Würtz: Just half an hour before the performance, I learned that my concert partner's flight had been delayed and he wouldn’t be able to reach the concert hall in time. I thought: let's not give up, let's see if we can rescue the situation. But not only did we rescue things, the first few bars I played with Kristof marked the start of a collaboration of many years. After this very successful performance, we soon realised we should continue, and besides concerts we should make a recording together. We thought of Schubert and Schumann, but since our story began with Beethoven, we stayed with him.

Kristóf  Baráti and Klára Würtz (photo: Zsófia Imrik)

Talking of Beethoven, can you describe that joint vision that you felt was worthwhile committing to disc?

KW: At the Liszt Academy, Pál Kadosa used to say that Beethoven always looks you straight in the face. His thinking is very direct and confrontational. And that similarly inspired both of us. We love capturing the whole of the work, thinking in terms of its structure and architecture. If I wanted to simplify, I would say neither of us faff around; we don't get lost in the details. Of course, that doesn't mean we can be superficial – there is no threat of that, since I grew up with the lessons of Kurtág and Rados, who uncovered every bar of a work with surgical precision.

KB: Let's ‘reset’ and wipe the dust off all the tradition which has accreted on works like the Spring Sonata and on slow movements generally over the past two centuries. We have to thank the historical performance movement, which has placed back into centre stage the structure of the work and has bid farewell to the egocentric approach and its obsession with instrumental perfection. This obsession, which culminated in the forties and fifties, emphasised those sections in the work that allowed instrumental perfection to be flaunted, in doing so making the mechanisms of action intended by the composer much harder to communicate successfully.

KW: The concept we represent is more habit than ideology. That we instinctively have similar visions in these questions is shown by the fact that we both very much admire the work of Toscanini. Whether he was conducting Italian operas or Brahms, the musical material is transparent, and remains clear amid even the greatest moments of ecstasy. Chamber music receives a prominent role in the Liszt Academy's concert offering. What is it that makes a chamber production competitive with a large scale symphony concert?

KW: I don't think there is any sense distinguishing between a good chamber music concert and a good symphonic one. Nor should a chamber musician and a soloist be two separate types of artists. At the highest levels of chamber music performance, a soloist background is required, and vice versa. From this point of view, I feel lucky that I was able to study at the Liszt Academy in the eighties, where it was natural for me to attend two lessons a week of chamber music with the legendary Professors Rados and Kurtág. As a teacher at the Utrecht Music College, I saw that chamber music is of fundamental importance in developing acoustic sense.

As part of Liszt Academy's ‘Live Complete Edition’ series, you are performing all of Beethoven's sonatas in a mini marathon. What is your opinion about this increasingly popular genre: does it justify its existence?

KW: I think that experiments along these lines do not always serve the works' interest. Every work is a separate world – it creates a round whole – and if we place too many next to one another, after a while they can extinguish each other. That is not to mention that that it also wastefully drains the performer's and the audience's attention and stamina. The structure that we have compiled for our series aims for the ‘golden mean’: it creates the opportunity to survey the works without overburdening the listener.

KB: The sonata cycle is definitely a good subject for such a concert series, because in these works all of Beethoven's many characters are thrown into relief. For example, the youthful style is more virtuosic, lighter, in places even Haydenesque, but certainly no less deserving of attention. And we find the great dramatic side in the Sonata in C minor and the Kreutzer Sonata. In the G major sonata opus 96, we are afforded a glimpse of Beethoven's late lyrical, more mature character which represents such an important cadence to Beethoven's art. To experience this spectrum in the course of two days is a fantastic thing for both performers and audience.

Interview by Péter Lorenz, originally published in the Januar-June issue of Liszt Academy Concert Magazine.