Bohemian Rhapsody

Who can ever forget Freddie Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody? When this exceptional and may I add unforgettable song was released, I was still at college and no such place as Bohemia existed geographically. At best some of us knew that a couple of Shakespeare plays were located in Bohemia but that was all.

Few of us had ever heard of ‘la vie bohemienne’. Yet Bohemia, up to the fall of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 was a large and prosperous country; a kingdom inherited by Ferdinand I Holy Roman Emperor through his wife Anne who was left heiress to Bohemia and Hungary when her brother Ladislas II was killed in the Battle of the Mohacs in 1526. Another ‘bella gerunt fortes…..’ windfall you might say but one which changed the course of Central European history forever.

Last Wednesday’s chamber concert at Sala Isouard put up by the Friends of the Manoel Theatre in collaboration with the Embassy of Austria and supported by Raiffaisen Bank consisted of three works with ties to Bohemia as a historical and political term which of course now is today the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. At the time when the possibly Croatian Haydn wrote his G major piano trio when in the service of the Hungarian Prince Nicholas II Esterhazy and when a century or so later Dvorak conceived his glorious E Minor ‘Dumky’ one, Bohemia and Hungary were ruled from Vienna. Werner Pirchner 1940-2001 who composed the third piece of the evening, Heimat PWV29b took his inspiration directly from Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. So it was, both directly and by association, a very Bohemian evening despite the oppressive heat and well worth the effort as the performance was utterly superb.

Afterwards I asked pianist Luca Monti why the trio was called The Schwarzenberg Trio expecting another great association with a family that was the primus inter pares of Austro-Hungarian grandees with humongous tracts of land in Bohemia only to be told the more mundane story that the trio meet up in Mr Monti’s apartment which is close to the Schwarzenberger Platz! Whatever the name, the trio’s performance was sheer delight. Pianist Luca Monti, violinist Vesna Stankovic and ‘cellist Roland Lindenthal enjoy a great rapport that produces wonderfully flawless playing with great soul that cannot fail to thrill and charm an audience to bits.

What really showed this deep lyricism up was the Poco Adagio - Cantabile from the Haydn Trio no 39 of that series in G major. This movement was distinguished by a superbly played melodic line that could have so easily been over-saccharinised by a violinist of lesser experience and good taste. The trio was superlatively elegant and was carried off with great style; especially the concluding Rondo alla Ungherese which was no doubt inspired by Haydn’s surroundings in Esterhaza Castle.

In those days ‘alla pollacca’, ‘alla turca’ or ‘alla ungherese’ were considered to be fashionable exotica and, at the time when Chinoiserie was all the rage and Khiang Xi and Chen Lung porcelain was ‘Europeanised’ by being encased and mounted with ormolu, these approximations of what Polish, Hungarian or Turkish folk music was meant to sound like were the dernier cri and incorporated in mainstream Italo-Teutonic musical forms.

A very curious 20^th century contrast was Werner Pirchner’s Heimat meaning homeland. While the first movement ‘Aus Dem Nichts?’ meaning ‘from nowhere?’ had passages that vaguely recalled the more Jewish elements of Bloch with some gypsy zest it was the slow and atmospherically bluesy ‘Wiesel?’ (why ‘weasel?’ I will never fathom) that got under my skin. Then the fun started with ‘Stimmungslied?’ meaning ‘mood song?’; a sort of 18^th century pastiche where at one point the violinist left the stage and a short time after the ‘cellist absconded too, leaving the pianist to fend for himself. By eschewing the fourth movement ‘Freundlich?’ or ‘pleasant?’ the audience was left to imagine what may have been………a little gimmicky, however for those who know the first and possibly the last trade unionist composition by Haydn, the Farewell Symphony, musicians leaving the stage in dribs and drabs comes as no great surprise.

The evening concluded with Antonin Dvorak’s magnificent Dumky E Minor 1891 Piano Trio which consists of no less than seven movements, all choc- full of the most gloriously tuneful melodies and folksy colourations that can ever be imagined; dumky being the operative word here as it is the plural of dumka which means ‘a fleeting thought’.

Naturally the most soulfully dramatic passages were given to the ‘cello, Dvorak’s favourite instrument which in turn lends a unique and unmistakable timbre to Dvorak’s music whether chamber or orchestral. How wonderful to be able to sit back and drink it all in. The Schwarzenberg Trio’s performance of this splendiferous work was stylish, crisp and made the most of those magical passages that in turn thrilled and charmed with their fritillaric melodic lines and frenetic working passages.

The piano trio is, after the string quartet, the most popular form of chamber music probably because it is so expressive. All three instruments are given equal weight and value contrary to what one usually finds in piano quartets and quintets that are more like miniature piano concertos. The Schwarzenberg Trio ‘s performance showed us all what top of the range chamber music should sound like and I hope that they will return next season to play at the Manoel Theatre itself and not Sala Isouard in, I hope, more clemently cool weather.

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