Of the myriad ways to discover the true soul of a nation – through literature, food, art or history – perhaps music provides the most potent medium. Picture Spain and you instantly hear the hypnotic rhythms of flamenco; Italy, the tinkling mandolin; Greece, the seductive bouzouki; France, the street-corner accordion. This music of the people, for the people, developed and shaped over centuries of human endeavour and experience, rarely finds a place in the concert hall in its original form, and yet it has provided the springboard for so many extraordinary orchestral works, particularly during the last century.
When we think of Hungary we hear the firelight flash of the gypsy violin or the silvery tremble of the cimbalom, but it was the composer Béla Bartók who established that this was very much an urban idea of Hungarian folk music. For true authenticity, in 1907 he took an Edison phonograph into the Eastern Carpathian mountains and recorded villagers singing their strangely-metered songs, hearing them bend notes and decorate phrases, or accompany a melody in a distant key. These distinct features would find their way into his own compositions – not least because at the time he was suffering from unrequited love and the sharp dissonances of this earthy music came to represent a stubborn young woman who simply would not be wooed.
Bartók’s musical curiosity eventually took him through the Balkans into Turkey and even across the Mediterranean to Algiers, amassing some 7,000 tunes over several years. Some of the results of his studies and manuscripts of his subsequent compositions can be found in the library of the Budapest Music Centre, just one of the venues for the Bartók Spring International Arts Weeks, a new venture launched to mark the 140th anniversary of the composer’s birth and one that aims to become an annual event, attracting music lovers from around the world, when travel resumes.
In this extraordinary year, with the pandemic making arts ventures everywhere examine how best to connect with their audiences, the Bartók Spring will use technology to stream an extensive series of free events, not just from Budapest’s premier venues (and even some of its attractive parks and botanical gardens) but also from concert halls around Europe.
Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will play from the stage of the Royal Albert Hall, in London. Similarly, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists will perform from the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. Riccardo Chailly and the Filarmonica della Scala will stream from Milan, while in Switzerland, René Jacobs joins forces with the Kammerorchester Basel at the Paul Sacher Hall, Basel.
In Budapest, audiences will see performances streamed from the city’s premier music venues, but in future years it is hoped that towns across Hungary will host the festival’s wide variety of concerts and lure music-loving tourists to some of the less visited yet fascinating parts of this historic nation. To whet travellers’ appetites, films showing several beautiful and intriguing areas of the country will precede most of this year’s streamed concerts.
The festival is under the umbrella of Müpa Budapest, one of Hungary's best known cultural institutions and a home for classical, contemporary, popular and world music, jazz and opera, as well as circus, dance, literature and film. Csaba Káel, CEO of Müpa Budapest believes “an extraordinary period requires extraordinary, creative solutions”. He recalls that Bartók is remembered saying that no one can know the world in its entirety, because it is endless in both space and time. “Nonetheless,” he says, “we will make an attempt in this challenging and unusual year to diminish the space and time between some of the most compelling artists in the world and the audience, by connecting Hungarian and European cities on the digital platforms of the Bartók Spring.”