Audio
Songs and Dances of Life
The idea for Songs and Dances of Life was born out of our wish to celebrate Transylvania and the town of Sibiu, European Capital of Culture 2007. Sibiu has always been an important cultural centre, a cosmopolitan melting pot, where a multitude of nationalities - Romanian, German, Hungarian, Slovak and Ukrainian – coexisted for centuries.
It was a challenge for us to translate this environment into the language of music. The result is a wonderfully diverse collection of harvest and soldiers’ songs, carols, religious songs and ballads, to which we added some rare miniatures, such as four late pieces by Franz Liszt, a Slovak melody by Béla Bartók and the Hungarian Melody by Franz Schubert. What we found was, that, despite their completely different geographic origins, all these works are united through their collective ethnographic heritage.
The following thoughts can help to illustrate our point further: in the year 1846, Franz Liszt gave a concert in Sibiu; spending his childhood in Transylvania left a strong imprint on György Ligeti’s musical style; Janácek’s Madonna of Frydeck is not only a religious image of a procession in a small town, but also a distant song that a shepherd plays on his flute - an image that would fit the Transylvanian landscape perfectly, as would a misty, magical Fairy Tale by Bohuslav Martinu. Both Schubert and Bartók were haunted by the very heart and soul of Hungarian countryside – the melody. There is a wonderful short anecdote in relation to this. In 1904, Bartok planned to perform his own Piano Quintet in concert. At the last moment, Schubert's "Trout" Quintet was substituted. "It was a work full of interest, as evocative and imaginative as his other compositions," wrote a reviewer, who astonishingly believed the work to be Bartok's. "Here we had evidence of the warmth of his Hungarian heart as well as the wide knowledge he brought to the writing of the music".
Songs and Dances of Life could perhaps serve as one more proof that Transylvania, and especially the town of Sibiu, is a musical link and a cultural crossroads between Romania and Europe.
Canti Drammatici
Release date: March 2008