kamara.hu/1 – Memory Presented by Liszt Academy

This year Izabella Simon, Dénes Várjon and their musician friends set the novel Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb under the spotlight. The book deals with the most exciting questions of the human soul that all have within them. “On the train, everything seemed fine,” are the opening words of Antal Szerb’s novel. A single sentence, yet it contains numerous central motifs of the work: travel, nostalgia, yearning, change, transience and crisis, even the thought of death. It provides superb raw material for a classical music festival. Izabella Simon and Dénes Várjon saw this in the same way: they have structured the programme of this year’s kamara.hu around the curious story of Mihály. Works by four composers of four nationalities are performed at the opening concert of kamara.hu. Although separated geographically speaking, the composers are linked by an invisible thread: Journey by Moonlight. According to Beethoven’s friend Karl Amenda, the slow movement of the first version of the composer’s string quartet opening the concert depicts the funeral scene of Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare. The piece by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg is associated with the Antal Szerb novel by the motif of pathfinding: the three violin sonatas symbolize the three stages of his life, the final one, the work in C minor, being born in the spirit of the ‘widening horizon’. “Oh that’s the way,” Mignon’s cry is repeated in the poem by Goethe and in the song by Liszt. This longing, the In the Deep Night of My Dream and the tempting but deadly Loreley, are also related to the novel. The concert closes with another Italian excursion, Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence.