In October of last year, a unique concert took place in the Dvorana of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Pianist MAGDALÉNA BAJUSZOVÁ performed the complete surviving works for solo piano by Alexander Albrecht, an important Bratislava composer and cultural figure of the first half of the 20th century. The concert recording has now been released as a double album by the Music Centre. Although the initial aim was to add a small fragment to the mosaic of our cultural memory, the result is much more than a documentary gesture.
When and how did the idea arise to perform the complete piano works of one composer in a single concert, especially a composer for whom there is almost no interpretative tradition?
It was one of a long series of ideas that have accompanied me for about twenty years. For reasons I do not fully understand, extreme challenges and extreme dramaturgies keep appearing in my artistic life. It began long ago with a phone call asking whether I could step in and play at least four of Jozef Kolkovich's Preludes at New Slovak Music in four days. It continued with a call from Milan Paľa asking whether I could go with him to the Janáček competition in five days, where sonatas by Janáček, Martinů and Iršai had to be prepared.
This mode of artistic existence has somehow stuck to me: either the time for preparation is extreme, or the scale of the dramaturgy, or the health circumstances behind it. In youth I enjoyed facing such challenges and telling myself how wonderfully I would manage them and what an extraordinary life I was living. Later, life brings new dimensions that force compromises, and in artistic life compromises are often destructive.
Such concepts easily disappear because fatigue grows and their realisation is painful. That is why I am glad these situations still happen to me; they keep me in a peculiar kind of alertness, even though the pain increases. Albrecht was one of Vladimír Godár's ideas. He is the spiritual father of many of my projects: Zeljenka's 24 Preludes, Kolkovich's Nine Preludes and the premiere of his Piano Concerto, the complete Németh-Šamorínsky, the Suite in the 20th Century. Németh and Albrecht mattered to him especially.
He asked about Albrecht after a year of pandemic life. I did not bear the pandemic well. It washed away my mental range and destroyed any artistic ambition. I was rigid with concern that nothing should happen to me, so I could care for my son, and that nothing bad should happen to him. The teaching process kept me going, but it was online and very demanding.
I came to Albrecht more than a year after I had last touched the piano as a pianist. There was also the chilling awareness that Otto Nopp, the sound engineer who had recorded most Albrechtina concerts, did not have much time left. Under the weight of these circumstances it was decided that I would play this colossus in October.
The concert lasted more than two hours and you played it without an interval. How can one maintain physical and mental concentration over such a long span, especially in music that is technically far from easy?
“One must be brave, one must know how to think, and one must not withdraw one's heart from anything,” Albrecht wrote, and it became my motto. The difficulty of the circumstances surrounding such productions usually awakens inner reserves in me. Perhaps because nothing had happened for a long time, these reserves had accumulated and prepared themselves for one goal, concentrating through blood, sweat and tears towards a single summit.
The healing power of the work was important too: the realisation of how far I had moved during the pandemic from beauty and from resting within myself. To answer concretely, it is possible when you do not actually know that the programme will last two hours. According to Vlad's information it should have been under ninety minutes. The pieces had existed separately; other pianists had played them, but their duration unfolded differently for me.
I began to sense during the work that something was not right: why had I already practised for seven hours and still had the four-movement Suite or the Twelve Little Pieces ahead of me? I blamed my post-pandemic lack of form, but in reality the programme was enormous. I started studying it in August and the concert was in October. I discovered its real length together with the audience.
After the first half, I looked at my watch backstage and broke into a cold sweat: I had been on stage for more than fifty minutes and knew that roughly the same stretch still lay ahead. The audience response suggested they would endure it. The programme was conceived as a dramaturgical arch, and I perceived the interpretation of Albrecht as my mission. Respect for Albrecht, for who he was, how he lived and what he did in our environment, became the source of that immense concentration.
Already in the first piece on the album, the New Year Greeting, one feels a pleasant breath of Central European Art Nouveau: florid, mature harmony and excellent piano writing. Did anyone in our milieu compose piano music at this level at that time?
I think not. For a long time I believed Albrecht's music was something long and exhausting, but those were stereotypes from my student years. I realised this the first time I touched it. His handling of piano material is so sophisticated that the question of whether he was an innovator becomes less interesting. He himself said that every good and valid work is modern. He built on the Beethoven-Brahms tradition, but by deepening those means and incorporating them into a context one might call Central European Art Nouveau, he gave them an entirely original spirit.
There is, for example, Bell's Sonata in B minor, a fundamental work, but I would guess it is not as naturally pianistic as Albrecht's piano music.
Albrecht received piano training at the highest level. At the Budapest Academy, and before that privately, he was taught by Bartók. His pianistic culture was set so high that it inevitably showed in his compositional work. He was friends with Bartók, admired him greatly and was equally strict with himself. Everything is restrained and yet maximally refined.
If you say Albrecht's piano texture feels natural, it is a little ironic, because in reality it is very difficult. That difficulty comes from the complexity of the musical fabric. The result, however, must sound immediate, human, warm and alive. If the performer remains on the surface of this complexity and draws attention to it, the effect is not good. The task is for all the complexity to form the lower layer while natural musical expression remains on the surface. That is the hardest thing.
A central work in the first part of the programme is Albrecht's student Sonata in F major. It has only two movements; the first is ambitious and almost symphonic, while the second offers variations on a minuet. Do you sense a disproportion?
On the contrary, I like this formal solution very much. The first movement may not be exploratory, although I admire the level of craftsmanship, extraordinary for a young man, and there are original moments. But for me the point lies in the second movement. Its concept, beginning with a light minuet that gradually darkens in the variations before culminating in a final firework, seems extremely attractive. Albrecht considered the sonata immature, though he admitted that it contained successful passages. I fell in love with it, especially the second movement.
The Aphorisms are also interesting: three miniatures of about a minute each. Albrecht evidently felt at home in short forms. Why did he not write twenty aphorisms rather than three?
It has to do with all the other areas to which he devoted himself. He was conductor and director of the Bratislava Church Music Society, led the Municipal Music School, and devoted himself to organisational and educational work. Late in life he sincerely regretted that composition had fallen victim to these activities. He could not close himself into his own bubble and compose when he saw how much needed to be done in Bratislava. The only way I could express respect for him was to play everything he wrote as well as possible.
The Twelve Little Pieces from his late period also belong among the miniatures. They date from the early 1950s, are intended for young people and work with folk songs, as the social demand of the time required. In the end they do not really fulfil that demand. They are certainly not pieces for beginners, and the treatment of folk material has none of the naivety typical of much music of that orientation from the period.
At first glance I did not notice their complexity at all. I left them for the final two weeks before the concert. Then it came. The very first piece, Spievanky, with its anti-pianistic material, created the impression that Albrecht wanted to write twelve punishments for young pianists. Everything seems simple at a basic level, but the internal arrangement of the material resists natural grasping: held notes, silent substitutions, chromatic layers. Each piece was a struggle and the clock was ticking.
It almost seems as if Albrecht was teasing the social demand of the new period: socialism, folk character, directness.
I perceive it similarly. Albrecht was too erudite and too good a pianist for this not to have been clear to him. I feel there is a message there, not explicit, but in the form of a certain irony. He repeatedly stressed that he was concerned with truth and strength in music, that music should reflect the beauty of life and the complexity of the human soul. His music is very warm and communicative, and even when it dares to excess it returns and allows one to rest in a kind of expressive softness.
Can we speak of this anchoring as a movement towards modernity followed by a return to the familiar territory of Central European genius loci?
We can understand it as another semantic layer of his works, and this awareness should also inform interpretation. Albrecht must have had an extremely difficult working life, also because he chose to return to Bratislava while his colleagues and contemporaries - Bartók, Schmidt and Dohnányi - lived in major centres. He knew there was only a thin layer of intelligentsia here and that daily work in culture awaited him. He tried with all his strength to cultivate and professionalise the local environment.
As an alien element he had already appeared from the mid-1920s, when he wrote the piano Suite and the Sonatina for eleven instruments, modernist works without an equivalent in our conditions. Albrecht was, in fact, always an alien element: a revolutionary among petit bourgeois citizens, a sceptic in the temple, a liberal in dictatorship, an internationalist in nationalism. From today's perspective, that is precisely what makes him so attractive.
Róbert Kolář, Hudobný život 9/22