MUSIC REVIEW : SONOR Sheds Light on Hungarian Music

Only yesterday the music of Bela Bartok seemed an adequate representation of contemporary Hungarian music. In truth, Bartok has been dead for nearly half a century, and music in Hungary did not come to a halt after World War II just because the Iron Curtain kept the country isolated from the West.

Wednesday night at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium, the contemporary music ensemble SONOR performed a lengthy concert of Hungarian music written since 1969. Although a single program cannot tell the whole story, this sampler, selected and conducted by guest conductor Janos Sandor, revealed a cautious, highly abstract and formal school of Hungarian composition. A conductor and teacher from Budapest, Sandor is in residence at UCSD this term as a regents lecturer.

The majority of the composers on SONOR’s program adhered to the post-World War II atonal, serialist dogmas, which can be boiled down to a single maxim, “Quick, stop me before I write a melody.” But two recent compositions, notably Laszlo Dubrovay’s Violin Concerto, showed an unabashed return to tonal, melodic writing. The composer’s lyrical effusion, however, was aptly contrasted with a complex web of accompaniment that prevented the concerto from descending to saccharine pastiche. Janos Negyesy played the solo in Dubrovay’s Concerto with his customary fluency and gleaming tone.

Zsolt Durko’s Three English Verses for soprano and chamber ensemble pale by comparison to Benjamin Britten’s felicitous settings of English poetry in similar guise, but Durko surely captured the existential Angst of T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday,” the final poem of the Three English Verses. (Eliot’s line from “Ash Wednesday,” “Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still,” made an appropriate motto for the 2 1/2-hour program.) As vocal soloist, Carol Plantamura sounded frayed and underpowered, although she articulated the texts with graceful precision.

Gyorgy Kurtag, the sole familiar composer on the program, was represented by a witty, playful set of Bagatelles, Op. 14, for flute, bass and piano. One of his sparse, jewel-like movements parodied the limpid opening motif from Debussy’s piano piece “The Girl with the Flaxen hair.” Kurtag called this clever bauble “The Crazy Girl with the Flaxen Hair.” Jon Fonville furnished its fleet flute solos.

It would be hard to find a more sophisticated, understated opus for percussion ensemble than Sandor Balassa’s Quartetto di Precussioni. Steven Schick led three colleagues in the extended, artfully balletic essay that saved the cumulative sonic horsepower of a stage full of percussion machinery until the finale. Otherwise, the effects were uniformly discrete and delicate.

Atilla Bozay’s Series for Chamber Ensemble proved to be a dirge-like litany of monotone statements. Its spare idiom resemble Bartok’s touchstone “night music” mood with all of the mystery and allure surgically removed. Istvan Lang’s “Musica 3-4-2” successfully merged serialist technique with Impressionist textures in a compelling chamber ensemble essay that opened the program.