Bartok, Eotvos, Ligeti Kopatchinskaja Cd2

This is the fourth recording by Patricia Kopatchinskaja on naïve; the second in the concerto repertoire. The collaboration with conductor/composer Peter Eötvos and the programme is an intense series of connections. Between Bartok, Ligeti, Eotvos and Kopatchinskaja, there are many links: Hungary, the land of the 3 composers featured; Peter Eötvos was the conductor of the first performance of the second version of Ligeti violin concerto, in 1992, with Ensemble Modern; Patricia Kopatchinakaja and Peter Eötvös have been working together for 4 years, performing several concertos, including those recorded here.

For her fourth album on Naïve, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja joins forces with composer/conductor Peter Eötvös, and her program of modern violin concertos is marvelously cohesive and direct. The three works by Béla Bartók, Eötvös, and György Ligeti reveal connections in style and substance drawn from a common heritage, built on the rhythms and colors of Hungarian folk music and communicated through innovative orchestration that incorporates extended techniques.

Only one year and a half after their first meeting in Budapest in early 1905, Bartók and Kodály were eager to jointly publish their first settings of Hungarian folk songs. In their foreword to the volume Magyar népdalok (Hungarian Folk Songs), they declare their goal thus: “…to get the general public to know and appreciate folk songs.”

"The violin", Edgard Varèse declared half a century ago, "does not express our epoch." But whatever the truth of that remark, then or now, its sister (or brother?) the viola has certainly been finding the occasion in the last several decades to express - if not the epoch - itself.
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The condition of Bartók's Viola Concerto - partial, imminent, not yet arrived - might have encouraged later Hungarian composers to feel that here was a genre in which something was waiting to be said. György Kurtág chose this as the form in which to present his graduation exercise at the end of his studies at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, a decade after Bartók's death. (Maybe not in this youthful work, but certainly in his later output, Bartók's absence is a prime motif and anxiety.) More than forty years later yet, Peter Eötvös returned to the image of the viola concerto - and perhaps the missing viola concerto - in his Replica.

Paul Griffiths - from the attached booklet

The works on this album were written between 1935 and 2019 by four Hungarian composers: Béla Bartók, who was the teacher of Sándor Veress, who taught György Ligeti, who in turn was an early but formative influence on Péter Eötvös. Their compositions all share the idea of a dialogue between cultured and popular elements, between a Western music tradition and folk music, particularly of Eastern Europe. This idea was formulated in the early 20th century by Bartók himself, who considered the use of folk elements in a piece of art music not only as a tool to revitalize the Classical tradition but also as a mean to unite different cultures.

This new recording marks the reformation of the legendary duo of Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Fazil Say. The Moldovan violinist says the Turkish pianist ‘is a volcano, with an indomitable strength and energy’, while he emphasises the ‘freedom’ that her ‘spontaneous playing’ exudes: ‘At each concert, she creates a different character and tells a new story.’ The explosive duo presents a programme devoted to Bartók’s Violin Sonata no.1 (‘a marvel from start to finish, one of his finest works’, says Patkop), Brahms’s D minor Sonata (‘I imagine a feather in flight at the opening of the sonata’) and Janáček’s Sonata, ‘an extreme work, wounded and heart-rending’.