Revizor: The French Collection
Colours and Tastes
On his third Hungaroton solo album József Balog plays works by French composers who, despite the long period setting them apart are intimately linked to one another (as also highlighted by Gergely Fazekas’ excellent narration). The three composers are Rameau, Debussy, and Boulez, a list I feel pleased about given that it brings one of the emblematic figures of baroque/old music together in the same club with two emblematic figures of 20th century music demonstrating that the music of these two eras is most organically related. József Balog is of course known for closing chasms rather than opening them. Hearing him perform a Mozart sonata, a Saint-Saëns concert or a jazz improvisation we never feel he is a visiting outsider in the given style. He is truly at home everywhere from Bach to Péter Wolf.
The first 40% of the CD is taken up by the suite in the g root note forming the second part of Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin, the third harpsichord piece of Jean-Philippe Rameau. (It is sometimes referred to as suite in G major despite the fact that about two thirds of the movements are in minor). The series contains works as popular as the character piece The Chicken or Les sauvages, i.e. ‘The Ball of the Wild Men’, gaining popularity as the leitmotive of the episode in the ballet Les Indes galantes with the same title.
There are two approaches to performing baroque harpsichord pieces on the piano. One is handling the composition as a transcription, and adapting it to the special features of the piano. That means the performer will not be forced to abandon home turf, and reserves themselves significant freedom in musical rendering. That freedom – as any freedom – may be used badly, but also brilliantly. The other option is to imitate the character, the technique of the original instrument, i.e. the harpsichord on the piano. Teachers erudite in historic performance, and old keyboard instruments usually advise their students not to employ that approach given that, due to the essential difference between the two instruments, that imitation may be at best partial, and imperfect, and the performer will soon face problems and dilemmas so complex, and requiring such developed musical judgment that are far more demanding than those faced when opting for the previous approach of adaptation. Meanwhile, from a purely artistic point of view the two approaches are equally justified.
József Balog is of course not a student, but has been a master for a long time. He had decided to attempt the impossible, and ‘twang’ the notes ‘dry’ all the way through, i.e. practically without using the pedals whenever legato play is not expressly required. (The springy or, indeed, the staccato nonlegato play is one of his trademarks anyway.) It is true of course that many artists reach that point. The big question is what to do with the singing play which, on a harpsichord, having a rather rigid, and mechanical sound takes a miracle to achieve. How shall one make that singing performance resemble the sound of a harpsichord, and how should it be different from playing e.g. Chopin on the same instrument? Well, one hears Balog has heartfelt legatos e.g. in the 2nd minuette or in the most daring, most lyrical piece titled L’enharmonique, and he plays them really differently. If I hear it right that legato play is based on a characteristic technique used for the harpsichord called finger legato meaning that the successive notes of the melody overlap to a very small extent, i.e. the performer lifts his finger off the note just a little after hitting the next key. That technique takes harpsichord players months or years of practice before it becomes instinctive – József Balog, however, does not hesitate to experiment. He may add some minimal pedal work, which is truly impossible to prove, thus making the illusion perfect. However, it requires perfect precision, and maximum concentration by the performer from the first note down to the last.
Here, however, I must cut short praising József Balog’s play of Rameau as 60% of the album still remains to be discussed. The part second longest after Rameau follows: Debussy’s plays, more specifically two books of Images, i.e. six masterly piano pieces written between 1901 and 1907. Even if they do not include works written in rigorous dance form, and thus we cannot refer to them as suites in the strict sense of the term, they are character pieces just as much as most movements of Rameau’s suite; moreover, Debussy refers to Rameau by name in the title of the middle piece of the first series. Debussy’s musical pictures are – of course – the utterances of a radically different artistic character. In his pieces, too, representation of movement is often central; picturesque, moreover, colour-centered, however, is a typical feature of Debussy, same as self-revelation, and the incredibly accurate, and suggestive representation of spiritual states. Meanwhile – to quote Fazekas – one hears an unfolding of purely musical structures admirably thought through. József Balog’s performance of Debussy is rises to significance by being able to ensure that neither side of the coin – neither expression, nor construction – is relegated to the background, neither is reduced to being secondary to the other. That is surely what Debussy intended to achieve given that he easily rebuked the performer – when he felt it appropriate – saying they fail to understand a single bit of his music.
Debussy’s images as performed by Balog are just as tense as the painter’s canvas in the frame. They fill the available time without leaving anything melting away or left uncontrolled. Meanwhile From the Moment is being heated by vivid impressions, and emotions, and offers the experience of unmitigated freedom to the audience. This is to a large part ascribable to Balog’s agogics ignorant of limits, while never losing control at the same time, and of course attributed also to the par excellence poetry of his play defying analysis.
As it makes no sense to use our own words to describe a music performance – it would be impossible anyway – I would only like to mention a few memorable moments from the pieces of the second series. One is the unearthly lontano sound of the return of ‘Bells through the Leaves’. Similarly the harsh emphasis of dissonance – reminiscent of Bartók – in ‘And the Moon Descends on the Temple’ offers agogics of particularly expressive effect, and the reduction into a folk song of the simple melody played ‘lointain’. Or the excellent sense of humour in the closing movement, the ‘Gold fish’ performed only through articulatory means.
With Boulez, sense of humour is perhaps not a relevant part of the individual style. Balog, however, gets a grip even on him meaning that he finds a way of demonstrating the ‘meaningful musical utterance’ (Fazekas) apart from rigour in his piano piece called Incises just like when playing Debussy. And although that is a significantly harder task here than with Debussy Balog once more found the non-mechanic, not only constructive gestures and the features of the character-piece, and discovered emotional nodes in the piece while – almost like a by-product – he overcame transcendent technical problems, too. I wonder if it would be blasphemy to say something like ‘he served Boulez to the audience’ prepared tastefully.
János Malina
Source: Revizor