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
Marzena Kasprzak-Godeaux and Bernard Godeaux (piano) 
