Franz SCHUBERT (1797-1828) Divertissement
à la Hongroise, D. 818 [37:26]
Johannes BRAHMS (1833-1897) Hungarian Dances Nos 1-3
[9:53]
Maurice RAVEL (1875-1937) Boléro [14:18]
Marzena Kasprzak-Godeaux and Bernard Godeaux (piano)
rec. December 2009, Witold Lutoslawski Polish Radio Concert Studio, Warsaw,
Poland
DUX 0774 [61:36] 
This is a bit of an odd release in several ways. The program itself is curious:
Schubert’s significant Divertissement à la Hongroise is coupled
with three short Hungarian Dances by Brahms, and then the Hungarian
motif is broken up by Ravel’s Boléro. The performance of the Schubert
is strange, as it only occasionally feels Hungarian - at, say, 11:15 in the
first movement - and the finale drags on for well over twenty minutes due
to sleepiness and an insistence on every repeat. And the booklet essay is
one of the most outlandish I’ve ever read.
Let’s start with the playing: for the most part, it is acceptable but bland.
The central movement of Schubert’s Divertissement is supposed to be
a march, but is very unmarch-like here, staid and rather dull. Jeno Jandó
and Ilona Prunyi on Naxos (an all-Hungarian team) bring off the rhythms with
far greater success, trim a minute off the total time, and even make the tunes
sound idiomatically folksy. The two accounts also radically differ in the
finale, which on Naxos takes fourteen minutes and on this new Dux release
requires over twenty. Jandó and Prunyi are simply livelier and more straightforward—but,
at last, one begins to appreciate the playing of Marzena Kasprzak-Godeaux
and Bernard Godeaux, lyrical and subtle in ways the Hungarians are not. Their
Schubert is more Schubertian. Still, need they have taken every single
repeat? This is good music, but twenty minutes of it is rather excessive;
the repeats are nowhere near as structurally essential as in, say, the late
sonatas, and under the rather soporific influence of Kasprzak-Godeaux and
Godeaux the music gets repetitive fast.
The Brahms Hungarian Dances (just the first three) go much better,
and even demonstrate - as in Dance No 1 from 1:35-1:50 - an element of spontaneity.
And best has been saved for last: Ravel’s Boléro, saved from sounding
insufferably repetitive by Ravel’s skillful use of seemingly every note on
the keyboard and by the Godeaux duo’s sensitivity of touch and indulgent romanticism,
at last put to good use.
Now we can turn to the booklet essays, by “world-famous pianist” Valery Afanassiev.
They are spectacularly bizarre. One is called “Schubert” and the other “Brahms,”
but ironically the only work on the program which is actually mentioned
at all in the booklet is Ravel’s Boléro! The “Schubert” essay,
composed in a sort of hyper-intellectual stream-of-consciousness style, briefly
discusses Schubert (two sentences) before turning to Spinoza’s ideas about
good and evil, Heraclitus’s remarks on justice in the universal order, comparisons
between Beethoven dances and paintings of village life, Freudian interpretations
of the word ‘unheimlich’ (“which may be translated as follows: uncomfortable,
uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly”), and whether or not ‘heimlich’
is “even more uncanny.” And that is just the first of four pages on “Schubert.”
Later we are treated to analyses of how the Japanese write history, the inability
of Nietzsche to eliminate pity, and the startling fact that “the tune” in
Boléro “is different” from a Schubert tune. Oh, really?
The Brahms essay is slightly shorter, and only five of the paragraphs omit
the word “Brahms,” but our voyage is just as exuberantly bizarre. Here is
the first sentence: “A London friend of mine maintains that every novel has
its own voice.” As a London resident extensively educated in American and
English literature, I can reassure Mr Afanassiev that, in fact, voice is an
essential property of all writing, as essential as, for example, using words.
A novel without a voice would be like music without tones. Even assuming that
what is meant is that every novel has a unique voice, the statement
is still akin to saying that every finger has its own fingerprint. I wonder
if Mr Afanassiev’s friend in London has made that discovery, too.
At any rate, the essay then goes on to say that the most characteristically
Brahmsian instruments are the clarinet and the cello, which is a pity as neither
appears on this recording. It compares various composers to buildings (“Wagner
might be represented by a medieval castle”), fantasizes about time-traveling
and falling victim to Beethoven’s ill-temper, misunderstands Shostakovich
as “hysterical frenzy,” quotes rather a lot of Chekhov, remarks that “Leonardo
[da Vinci] stands apart in the history of humanity,” and finally concludes
with a one-sentence paragraph which tells us: “Brahms’ late works are more
akin to silence than to sounds.” Which is a pity as Brahms’ late works do
not appear on this recording either.
It is rather depressing to report that the essays are the most memorable part
of the release. The Godeaux duo (Godeux?) plays well, if not with as
much Hungarian vigor as Jandó and Prunyi, and their Boléro is really
very nice. The recorded sound is perfectly good, the cover painting gorgeous.
But it is Valery Afanassiev’s essay to which I will be returning, for laughs
more than anything else. I cannot help thinking that he was pulling some kind
of prank on the performers. Did they get a chance to read this nonsense? One
wonders if, to borrow a pop culture catchphrase, Marzena Kasprzak-Godeaux
and Bernard Godeaux have been punk’d.
Brian Reinhart
Graceful pianism, but the hyper-intellectual train wreck of a liner essay
is more memorable.