Veszprém, Early Music Festival.
The tenth.
Sitting on the bench in front of the Jesuit church. There is still half an hour before the concert. Nice weather, birdsong, harmony.
I'm not so fond of looking into the past. I was with the 'Magyar Mozi TV' [Hungarian Cinema Channel] just like I used to be with 'Retró Rádio'. [both broadcast old music / films]
Both seemed like a great idea at first, but after a few months it started to feel stale, dusty, out of date, that the planets had moved on and we were not the same as we used to be. Things just fall out of resonance. They're gone, that's all.
You have to look forward, of course, I know.
But the present, everything, including tonight's concert, is based on the past. And I remember the old Veszprém and the old Jesuit Church. Back then, it didn't look like a church at all. It looked more like a dilapidated, neglected warehouse, many of us thought that Russian military equipment was being hit by the rain in there. (actually it was the stone warehouse of the Museum).
Then things got better: the park has been beautiful ever since, the church shines in its old light, and for the tenth year that it has received a 'musical' consecration every year. The latter, and the idea of the entire Early Music Festival, comes from Csaba Nagy. Who dares to dream things into the void, nothingness, emptiness. And what is the greatest human achievement, he was able to realize.
The fact that things suddenly appear in a vacuum and work and move and have an effect is simply an intangible phenomenon. Quantum physics, specifically. It will also be talked about, in a strange way, in the musical field as well.
*
Csaba on stage.
Just like the old days. Even though his hair has turned grey, it's more than just his physical appearance. He doesn't even touch the instrument, even then. Some kind of aura, something like that.
I don't know exactly.
The only difference is the instrument itself. Not the usual Renaissance lute, but a theorba. Nice instrument. With a long, long neck, a set of bass strings, a real complexity. Which was brought to life by the musical complications of the Baroque era.
Stringing is important now. It's almost more important than the sound itself. Because Csaba, who is a lover of gut strings, with every right, did what he did now: he put plastic strings on the easily out-of-tune part of the upper section, and the long ones that give the reverberation remained gut strings. Of course, plastic now does not mean the usual unnatural distaste, like the boxes of takeaway lunches, but composite materials, with space-age nanotechnology and very, very fine sound.
*
Beginning.
First swing. The sound?, don't forget, I'm a hi-fi guy, this is a key question for me. So, something amazingly beautiful, so, so beautiful and natural and complete, that it occurred to me that there should definitely be a recording of this. And the composite strings gave something even more important: during the whole concert, it didn't have to be tuned even once. Not even once. This is extremely rare, and it gave Csaba and the entire performance such a sense of calmness and stress-freeness that it was clearly felt by the audience as well.
Kapsberger.
Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger, in Latin Johannes Hieronymus Kapsberger.
My number one favorite for 30 years. So, the authentic concert report won't work.
A completely separate constellation in Early Music. There has been neither a predecessor nor a successor since then. It appeared at the beginning of the Baroque period, which was really a Metamorphosis, a new thing based on the spirit of the Renaissance, during the 'Nouve Musiche'.
He arranged his works in four volumes, each with its own flavour and fullness, three of which have survived, volume II has been lost, swallowed up by the centuries. In 1993, Rolf Lislevand introduced his music to the public, and since then, this curious phenomenon has attracted the attention of a surprising number of people, with Hille Perl, for example, describing Volume III as downright psychedelic, and the world-famous L'Arpeggiata paying tribute to Kapsberger by choosing the name.
Indeed, right from the start, you can tell that this is something different from what the audience is used to. At first glance, it may seem that attempts at ageism, for those unfamiliar with it, are bound to fail. Not the miracle of the Renaissance from the Airy Sky; not the perpendicular up-flow of the Celestial Harmonies; not even the form-constrained appearance of the Baroque. Rather it seems something subtly contemporary.
There is something difficult to describe in Csaba's performance that resonates completely with this music. So much so that for me it just elevated it to first place above the many very, very high-quality performances.
Why?
Maybe it's worth going back there, now that Kapsberger is playing toccatas, to find out what a 'toccata' really is.
The word itself means 'to touch'. Linguistic metaphysics is strong here: in the field of meaning, it is not mainly what happens physically, whether we touch it strongly or weakly, or for how long, but what is 'approaching'; which means a kind of mental attitude. A method, a ceremony, almost a rite. That it's not that the sheet music is there, there's the indication of which string is to be plucked next, then poof, we swing it, exactly, correctly, in time. No. Although, unfortunately, many musicians do this on the fly, as if they were auto-players.
No. But something completely different.
 |
| Weiner Heisenberg |
It's like when a story is wedged in here, the Story, remember?, 'The Story is always important', like when we approach someone we know or not, and before addressing them, we think for a long time about who they are, what we want, how we feel today, what the sky was like in the morning, how many shades of green there were in the afternoon, and that we intuitively let the situation develop and the continuation will be appropriate. All this in a fraction of time, before each note, and it is there for slow swings as well as for the fastest embellishments.
'Passacaglia' is now quite special. The basic melody is the frame on which the different repetitions place the fabrics, like a 3D printer, rotates and shows from different sides the formation that seems musically simple, but its reality will be extremely and beautifully complicated in this way.
I hear that it's not quite the version known from the records, after the concert I ask Csaba how much of this was according to Kapsberger's score, he laughs and says that at least half of it was written by him. Yes, this music almost demands that kind of attitude. On records, you can also find performers who were also not weak in this area, and wrote complete parts, even for completely different instruments, or simply omitted the turns they didn't like...
I have also thought a lot about why this is so, how this is possible from an age where records were already very precise. Actually, somewhere here is the point. And yes, I already like Kapsberger because it is so thought-provoking.
The threads lead very far.
It makes sense to call on Bach's music, which shines at the opposite point in the musical Galaxy. There is structure building, with pre-planned maneuvers and really beautiful solutions. For those who know it, after a few minutes of listening, the future solution/dissolution of the harmony is almost in your head, the interweaving of the fugues and parts is quite masterful, the experts have written volumes about the deeper theological, number theory and other correspondences. His cult is completely understandable.
So, musical processes travel from 'A' to 'B' according to a specific system, along a precisely constructed route, using all the tools of finite mathematics.
We could say, yes, a faithful representation of Earthly / Celestial reality, things basically work this way Above and Below.
Purely spiritual music.
Everything happens differently in Kapsberger's music. Something starts from 'A', here too. Then completely unexpectedly, without any precedent, a 'B' state follows. The harmonies are also beautiful here, as we often expect e.g. a musical resolution or a release, as it is customary, but it does not happen, but something in a completely different direction follows.
Totally different. It's so different that it just seems like there's no history, no antecedent.
A break from the causal constraint.
Not finite mathematics, and not even infinite. It's more purely quantum physics, isn't it?, because the electron is here, we measure it, it can even be described, then after a few nanoseconds, oops, it will be somewhere else. No, it doesn't go there, orbit there, or hover there, on a route. No. It will simply be there, somewhere else, in 'B', and that's it. There may even be a wall in between. No one knows how it gets there.
There is no history requirement.
Of course, debates are still strong today, but it seems that the real reality is deep down, it really is like this.
Sainte Exupery writes in the Citadel:
My warlords, beaten with utter stupidity, did not leave me alone with their proofs, they considered it self-evident that the events could be deduced from each other. Because, they assert, every effect has a cause, and every cause has an effect. And thus, inferring cause after effect, in the midst of loud proofs, they move towards error...
Csaba says that during the performance he often does not understand why Kapsberger wrote this or that way.
What comes out of all this musically? Well, some kind of endless, endless freedom. Yes, that's why it easily withstands the right intrusions. A singularity, a total present. There is no anxiety about the past, no special vision for the future. A set of momentary impressions of harmony. And a strong beauty cult, maybe that's why I like it so much.
Obviously, at the end, the music is tied to a thread, you can feel it, but this thread is hidden somewhere deeper, has a different geometry and a completely different essence. If it's a 'thread' at all.
I really like this presentation mode. I hardly know anyone who dares to pluck so softly. It's like he's not even on stage. I'm sitting 2 meters away, I can barely hear, even though the theorba is much louder than a Renaissance lute. The soft swing, on the other hand, thanks this treatment with an endless stream of overtones. Because it's not music anymore, it's a dialogue. He and the instrument, what thinks about this recalcitrant German-origin, Venetian-born Roman nobleman. Who casts doubt on the enthusiastic but somewhat strict posterity with direct counterpoint errors.
The infamous Toccata Arpeggiata. It is notorious for being so simple and so complicated at the same time. Something very strong is felt from under the many layers.
A strange internal rhythm unfolds, different for each performer. Like a retina ID. It really is like a poem. It is essentially inexplicable along the lines of words and simple chords.
The 'Capona'. Even I would consider it to be contemporary music, even though I know every single note of it.
As to what exactly happens in such cases, we can also look for answers in neuro-psychology, but I found a line in Ulysses that is relevant here. Yes, it's Ulysses, which didn't go well for me on the first reading either, but on the second, the situation is, one might say, 'encouraging'.
'Any object, if we look hard at it, can be a gateway to the incorruptible aeons of the gods.'
I don't really know.
Just that this music and this concert was one of the most freeing things I've come across recently.
I will always remember it.
Thank you all.
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Thank you for the images.
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