Mistresses and Unrequited Love
Patrick Glass reviews a classical concert with rather racy undertones.
Maestro violinist, Max Baillie, and world class pianist Ljubica Stojanovic played together for the first time at St Leonards’ Christ Church last month. Difficult to believe they’d not done so many times before. They make a great partnership, making the difficult De Falla, Debussy, Janacek, and César Franck look easy and entrancing.
The audience was in a novel setting: sitting around the piano and players, so that the concert had a salon intimacy. We started with De Falla’s Folk Songs. Max and Ljubica explained that these were taken from The Three-Cornered Hat (1919). Each of the three songs was indeed ‘tuneful and lilting’. De Falla had immersed himself in Spanish folk music on his return from a seven-year stay in Paris. He held that music is all about feeling, and the songs are Spanish to the core. Listening to the whole of The Three-Cornered Hat with its explosive opening of castanets and the orchestra clapping in time is exhilarating, and like nothing else in music – check out Barcelona Symphony Orchestra’s 2002 Proms on You Tube.
RIGHT CREDIT: Rod Webb
Janacek had a late flowering as a composer: he’d become avant-garde, a non-conformist with a new musical language – literally based on speech patterns. In 1917 Janacek, then 63, met and fell madly in love with Kamila Strosslova, who was 26 and married with two boys. It was unrequited, and Kamila became his muse. Kamila features in three of his operas, inspired the great Sinfonietta, the startlingly revealing String Quintet No. 2, and the Violin Sonata. It’s typical of his late style: short motifs, swift changes of tempo, and intense emotional expression. Max called it “a tour de force, modernist, powerful, eery, radical”. The Violin Sonata is in marked contrast to Janacek’s early Suite for String Orchestra (1877), written when only 23, with its beautiful melodies and Moravian Folk tunes.
Debussy’s Violin Sonata (1917), described by Max as ‘like a magical creature, ever fluid and capricious, organic and sensual’ is not attempted often. It’s challenging but was superbly played by our virtuosos. The Violin Sonata is difficult to warm to: unlike Clair de Lune or La Mer (completed by the bohemian Debussy in the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, with his new mistress, another married woman).
The Concert ended on a triumphant note with César Franck’s melodious Violin Sonata (1886). It’s said Franck brought a new seriousness to French Music that would later resonate with Debussy and Delibes. The sonata was played with great energy and facility: violin and piano in perfect dialogue. Max and Ljubica are wonderful together – versatile and engaging. As at any Max Baillie concert you’re invariably challenged, enlightened, amused, and uplifted. And always leave delighted.
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