Kopatchinskaja and Say want you to feel the music, not just hear it. Is that even possible? Can music convey and provoke feelings, just like that? Not if you play it the way Igor Stravinsky wanted it played. He thought music should be performed soberly, faithful to the notation, without emotions of any kind, so that it appeared clean, unsullied. Like pure thought.
That’s not what Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazil Say want, and that is not the repertoire they are choosing to present in Håkonshallen. Instead, they give us passionate emotional outbursts, fighting, playing. An invitation into a theatre of the emotions where music is an intermediary, a necessary evil, an occasion and an arena for an unpredictable play on various emotions, presented to us in all the colours of the rainbow.
The music they have chosen certainly invites eruptive emotional outbursts, but whether or not this concert becomes an emotional experience for you as a listener depends entirely on what emotions Kopatchinskaja and Say put into their performance. Because that is how the relationship between music and emotions work, say the people doing the research. What you feel, listening to music, comes from the musician. The feeling the musician has for the music quite simply rubs off on the listener.
As we know, a concert is not the same as a film. We cannot identify with Kopatchinskaja through her role as a violinist and cry with her the way we can cry with Meryl Streep in the movie Sophie’s Choice. But we can perceive, sense, not to mention hear the intensity or the earnestness and through it have an emotional experience of the performance. Depending on our mood of the day, our receptiveness or lack of it.
Works for violin and piano unceasingly lead us to think in terms of personal relationships. We see two people, in this case even a man and a woman, and we wonder how they relate to each other. One is sitting, the other is standing. One is bound to appear more like a soloist than the other, even though the duo no doubt will deny this, and claim the opposite. We have a drama on our hands.
And Beethovens Kreutzer Sonata does go off with a bang. First the violin appears alone, with an innocuous-sounding theme in the shape of a soothing chord progression, before the piano comes in to give us a rap across the knuckles. The piano takes a different view to the violin, to put it mildly, and presents us with almost the same theme, but from a minor key’s point of view. The mood has been set, and an aggressive sound dominates a fiery first movement. Are we witnessing a distressing argument, or two people finding each other through a common anger towards something else?
If the first movement is coloured by irreconcilability, it is precisely reconciliation which sets the tone in the second movement. Here, our two partners find common cause, and we hear something we will hear much more of throughout the rest of the concert: the playfulness and joy of finding a playmate, maybe even someone to fall in love with?
Liberating is not a strong enough word for the final movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Jubilantly and with reckless virtuosity, the violin and piano dance together as a salutation to the music, to the possibilities of man and the pure spirit. Do you think I care about a pathetic violin when The Spirit is speaking to me? – the composer might exclaim when musicians complained that the music was too difficult to play.
One should not read too much into these things, but it is striking that the concert programme as a whole reflects the same emotional movement as the one we find in the Kreutzer Sonata. First, a focus on friction, duelling and temper. Then we move into a calm, relaxed state, where everything congeals and comes together. In the end, a celebration of playfulness and good partnership. We move from the percussive and intense into intimacy and playfulness. A dramaturgy which seems liberating.
Maurice Ravel thought that the violin and piano from the outset represented two different worlds of sound. And even though we are now in a much calmer landscape than Beethoven’s, this incommensurability follows us, like an unease which refuses to let go entirely, neither in the first nor second movement. We keep hearing how Ravel lets elements stick out, seem inappropriate. This violin sonata from the middle of the 1920s is in many ways a portrait of modernity as seen through an impressionist’s glasses. Here, both blues and the machine are celebrated (the second and third movements), while the opening movement is a self-assured piece of musical Art Deco.
Béla Bartók’s Romanian dances are an exciting and surprising choice. Short, pure statements. Snapshots of people’s lives in the Balkans, given classical names which leave neither the performers nor the listeners with more to chew on. Something which, earlier in the concert, we have only been able to barely perceive is brought to the forefront in this work. The intense and strong, clear colours are also summed up at the end of the program in pianist Fazil Say’s own sonata for violin and piano. Here, Say responds in his own, Turkish dialect to Bartók’s depictions of life in his country, to Ravel’s crooked view of modernity, and the sense of liberation Beethoven left us with in the last movement of the Kreutzer Sonata. And, as eager Norwegian sports journalists are fond of asking, surely the appropriate question after an intense séance like this must be: what are you feeling now?
TEXT: Glenn Erik Haugland
English version: Martin Grüner Larsen