Good friends…

From November 2015 the Liszt Academy continues a tradition and creates a tradition. Continues because for about a decade Dénes Várjon and Izabella Simon – who are a couple on the piano and in their private lives – have organized chamber music series which, from now on, are hosted by the Liszt Academy. And given that it is not ‘this time’ but ‘from now on’, we can quite rightly speak of creating a tradition. The kamara.hu festival is organized annually in the third week of November. Starting from the World of Yesterday series, arranged with Kálmán Strém, the organizer couple consider it important to give their festivals a theme. The series of concerts in 2015 has been entitled Firsts and Lasts. Just as in Ulitskaya’s book, here too the focus is on human diversity – in this case, the diversity of composers. On the one hand, a composer’s early and late works are contrasted; on the other hand, comparisons of selected composers’ mature styles are made. Right in the fi rst concert (on 19 November) we fi nd out to what degree the styles of Mozart and Beethoven are comparable and also what diff erent directions Schumann and Beethoven chose. “It is fascinating to see where the composers started out from and where they culminate, and just how diff erent this path is for everyone. Who was the person opening up new paths to the future, and who was more recapitulative”, Dénes Várjon told the Liszt Academy Concert Magazine.

The kamara.hu programme has given space to unique works, too: works which, in terms of their genre or instrumentalization, are one-off s in the oeuvre of the given author. One example of these is the horn trio by Brahms. There are rarities such as Shostakovich’s Suite on Verses of Michelangelo (performed by Izabella Simon and István Kovács), an “unbelievable and moving piece”, according to Izabella Simon. Another curiosity is Beethoven’s Grand Fugue, transposed for four hands on the piano by the composer himself. The struggle of creation is evident in the handwriting on Beethoven’s autograph. “Some of the late works clearly had not been easy for the performer. If a work of this calibre becomes easy, then it loses its essence. The internal struggle of the performance is all part of the work,” Várjon commented about the Grand Fugue, especially the four-hand version. In the arrangement the two performers in eff ect play the two upper and the two lower string parts in their original form. There are “serious diffi culties in movement” in the work due to the many crossings of harmonies and parts, therefore the four-hand ‘law’ is particular valid in this case: “the four-hand must function as a single organism”, in other words, the two pianists must be in total harmony and know each other inside out.

Izabella Simon and Dénes Várjon (Photo: Andrea Felvégi)

However, this ‘law’ applies equally to all chamber music playing, and this is precisely why the organizers have such good friends. Every artist, every chamber music partner taking to the kamara.hu stage is a close friend of the couple and has made music with them for many years. “Luckily we have a very broad circle of artist acquaintances, so we were able to invite fantastic people from both Hungary and abroad,” said Várjon, adding that on the domestic front the Liszt Academy has much to be thanked for because it is the seat of chamber music life and work. Bassoonist György Lakatos comes from this background, as do two of the world’s most in-demand musicians, Kristóf Baráti and István Várdai. Renowned foreign guest musicians include the superb Croatian horn player Radovan Vlatković, twenty-fi ve-year-old Veronika Eberle (violin), with whom the Várjon couple have already played in concert here in Hungary, the great soprano Mojca Erdmann, and the Casals Quartet – and these are only a few names from the list of stars. Izabella Simon and others also spoke about the next kamara.hu: Steven Isserlis, Tabea Zimmermann, Viviane Hagner, Jörg Widmann… And this is just the beginning.

Thanks to Izabella Simon there is a literary and children’s programme attached to the festival. Francis Poulenc’s Babar for piano and narrator gave the artist the idea of planning an interactive performance for children designed to open up the world of classical music to the young. “It is very diffi cult to fi nd a concert where the focus is on classical music and they admit young children, because they are noisier and less able to sit still for long periods,” Izabella Simon explained. Her concert, however, has breaks for moving around, the children can overcome their fears and go up on stage in order to have this sort of experience, even if later on in life they move away from the arts. Simon believes in having an intimate relationship with music: “It is vital that children come close to music, that they are also physically close to the music and the performer.” The long-term aim is to help preserve and develop the world of fantasy for children, which for an artist remains indispensable throughout their life. Izabella Simon is a great believer in the meeting of the arts, and she wants as many children as possible to experience this conference of the arts through her programmes.

The artist’s other initiative can also be linked to co-arts. She has invited author György Spiró to the festival. With him she plans an informal talk that also involves the audience: chatting about art, for instance, learning what Firsts and Lasts means to a writer. But since music is a binding element of kamara.hu, it cannot be left out of this programme. The conversation is interspersed with short musical interludes, all in the name of the relationship between music and literature. You might wonder how. What do instruments sound like outside the concert hall? What does a Liszt Academy classroom with bean bags look like? What is it like to come really close to music? And primarily, how do professional artists, even real friends, make music together? All will become clear in November.

Dániel Mona