100 — Midsummer Night Concert at Leányfalu

For our combined hundredth birthday — Anita + Adam, 100 years together — we celebrated Midsummer Night (Szentivánéj) at Leányfalu with our friends, and with a small concert. This was my little guide to the little concert:

01 — The concert (15 minutes)

Flautist Anna Rákóczy and clarinetist Lajos Rozmán perform József Sári’s Evening Lights (Esti fények, 1999) and the second movement of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s F minor duo (1730).

Anna and Lajos are musicians we deeply admire — they fill the House of Music with contemporary music too. We met Anna in Vienna and became close friends during Covid, and we have followed and loved her work ever since. We asked them to play for us — and for you — because together with Lajos they create a world where a lifetime of knowledge stands behind every note, and behind every musical decision a free, creative and profoundly authentic contemporary sensibility.

Evening Lights is the transcript of an improvisation for two instruments. József Sári fixed the pitches precisely, but left the rhythm and the manner of performance entirely to the players. The same material becomes different at every sounding: the two performers shape their own time, breath and character into it. We hear what Sári wrote down — but the way only Anna and Lajos can tell it.

The F minor duo: Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Johann Sebastian’s eldest son — the one his father considered his most talented child — carried the contrapuntal tradition onward while already turning toward a newer, lighter, melody-centered taste. This small movement takes us into a world of delicate transition: the era when horizontal music, the world of interwoven, together-singing melodies, slowly turns into vertical thinking, where a flow of chords accompanies the melody — as in most of today’s music. Many of us love this period, because heard with today’s ears it produces especially exciting harmonies.

02 — The musical reading (15 minutes)

Then I play the Chaconne from Johann Sebastian Bach’s D minor violin partita (1720).

A friend of mine who also loves Bach once said that playing this piece is like reading. There are so many beautiful details in it that you come to know closely that it is a joy to play even for yourself alone. And without any false modesty: this will not be like a classical musician performing it after a lifetime of practice. There will be small mistakes and uncertainties — perhaps the way there are when someone reads a beautiful text aloud. It is not a theatre performance. We attend to the text together.

I fell in love with this piece a few years ago, hearing it on the violin. I listened to it endlessly, and even grew a little sad that I had never learned to play the violin, it captivated me so. Then I pulled myself together, and over a few years — not continuously, alongside everything else — I slowly learned it.

Many consider it one of the peaks of the music literature. It is unusually long and extraordinarily complex for its time. Perhaps it was inspired by grief — we do not know for certain. It sets out from a powerful, dramatic D minor; in the middle we arrive in a gentle, ever-brightening major world, like a beautiful memory; at the end we return to the minor mood, to come to rest at last on a single D. Throughout, we hear ever richer variations of the same harmonic progression and theme, with countless ideas and fine creativity.

I hope it brings you joy even so: read aloud, and only in part performed.