Globetrotting recital brings poignancy, swagger and decadence to the Istanbul Music Festival

It’s often the case that, at the end of any lengthy journey, we want to take stock and look back to where we began. Doing this was especially interesting at the culmination of Benjamin Appl and Martynas Levickis’ recital at the Istanbul Music Festival, being as it was a globe-trotting evening of song, moving through Vienna, Paris and Berlin, before arriving in New York. 

This final destination was the longest, which perhaps highlighted even more the fact that, here at the end, the musical language was at its simplest. Empty circularity from Glass, banal meandering from Bernstein, basic childishness from Copland; a decidedly underwhelming conclusion, only enlivened by songs from Gershwin, Porter and Weill with their slightly greater ambition.

Prior to this, in Berlin, the duo made the most of the music’s evocative swagger and sense of unashamed decadence. In Friedrich Holländer’s Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt this was balanced by a distinct tone of tenderness, while three earlier songs by Kurt Weill went the other way, lusty sarcasm and anthemic sweep (with the continual sense that we should all be singing along), Levickis’ accordion dancing and tumbling around the cyclic verses of Mack the Knife.

We arrived in Berlin via a brief excursion to Spain, in an absolutely sublime rendition of Piazzolla’s 1982 Oblivion, Levickis blending vigour and melancholy such that he conveyed surprising emotional weight. It was most exciting in a lovely sequence where the music almost fizzled out, landing on a high chord, vanishing one note at a time, before pushing on at speed again.

For our time in Paris, the duo initially adopted a somewhat more serious approach. Appl articulated Reynaldo Hahn’s C’est à Paris like a stylised recitative, Levickis closely following his contours and cadences, all at a languid pace. This was given an injection of passion in À Chloris, before shifting up several gears for the wry humour and carousing ebullience, culminating in waves of laughter, of Ravel’s Don Quichotte à Dulcinée.

Their journey began in Berlin, and it was here that the lofty acoustic of St Anthony of Padua Church experienced the most colourful and expansive display of lyrical and harmonic imagination. At one end of the spectrum was Schoenberg’s Gigerlette, delivered extremely tongue-in-cheek and with an elasticity that became downright mischievous. Korngold’s Der Knabe und das Veilchen was similar, in the form of a folk ditty, though for Liebesbriefchen the tone shifted radically, Appl and Levickis interpreting it as something hymn-like, steadily moving together in a display of an altogether different kind of beauty. Cheek and fluidity came to the fore in Alma Mahler’s Laue Sommernacht, yet Appl qualified this by shaping the song to bring out real poignancy.

Yet in hindsight it was our starting point that demonstrated more than anything else just how superbly well Appl and Levickis are together. Throughout the concert it was as if all music had been redefined to their specific parameters of baritone and accordion, and that was overwhelmingly true in their performance of Gustav Mahler’s Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht (from the composer’s song cycle Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen). Nothing about it sounded remotely like an arrangement; this was seemingly precisely as it was always intended to be, Levickis magically summoning up pseudo-wind and string sections from his instrument. Appl reached deeply into the text, moving with liberal rhythmic flexibility, in the process making the words entirely his own. This was the evening at its most powerfully intense and moving, all the more so when Appl unexpectedly turned inward, becoming subdued at its very end. 

Simon’s press trip was funded by the Istanbul Music Festival.