Parsifal and Winter Opera Round-up (2)

Last night we had the Easter production of Wagner’s Parsifal, the titan of all operatic works, at least for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. It’s a special part of the operatic calendar here, performed only twice each year – in keeping with the theme – on Good Friday and Easter Monday, a tradition dating from 1983 when the gradual communist thaw allowed Parsifal to be played again for the first time in many years, in spite of its quasi-religious themes of compassion and redemption. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was also banned here during the war years, as it was in Germany owing to its pacifistic message: the Wagnerite’s best rebuttal to the silly charge that the Master, along with his other admittedly poor character traits, was also a Nationalist Socialist – half a century or more before the Nazi party was formed  – or would necessarily have been sympathetic to most of their aims. I always go to the Monday performance (except last year, when I was in Belgrade).

The cast stays relatively stable from year to year, although some have moved on to retirement (András Molnár) or more distant destinations (goodbye László Polgár). This year we had a good mix of the old and the newish, with Judit Németh as Kundry (a little shrill at times, I liked her performances in previous years better, just as I thought István Beczelly’s Klingsor might have lost a degree or so of impotence-related menace, but both were perfectly competent) and masterful Béla Perencz as the wounded Amfortas, the Wagnerian analogue to the Fisher King (At the performance two years ago Perencz himself was a wounded king, muted by a bad cold. Fortunately, the announcer announced, they happened to have an American baritone-bass, Allan Evans, at hand visiting the company who had sung Amfortas when studying at Bayreuth years ago and who had volunteered to step in and lend his voice at the last minute, but not to act the part, which Perencz evidently could still handle. So we got the marvelous juxtaposition of the wild-haired half-mad priest-king lip-synching the words that were emerging from the mouth of what appeared to be, from three tiers up, Louis Armstrong in a tuxedo, who was booming out some pretty impressive Amfortas from a chair placed on the side of the stage.)

The new included guest Austrian bass Albert Pesendorfer, who brought the right gravity to the difficult role of Gurnemanz, although he did manage to get drowned out by the orchestra for a few seconds around the climax of the Good Friday Music. And there is something thrilling about having a native speaker of German singing about 30% of the non-choral lines of the opera, which also probably helps keep the Hungarian performers on their enunciative toes. In the title role, tenor István Kovácsházi’s, except for a few key moments, subdued take on the lost knight seemed an improvement over András Molnár, who played Parsifal more or less the same way as he played Siegfried and Siegmund, and Tannhaüser for that matter: lots of shouting. Special applause reserved for János Kovács and the orchestra, for whom the 5+ hour performance is no doubt extremely grueling, and in which they show that they are one of the main strengths of the opera company.

For the audience, composed mainly of die-hard friends of the Hungarian State Operas, this is an Easter rite in itself. The tourists and students who didn’t know what they were getting into mostly depart during the first intermission, and almost all of them by the third act, when the grandest of the music ensues, which lends a sense of both intimacy and spaciousness to the rest of us. Given the minimalism of the conservative set design and the sporadic nature of dramatic action, as well as the fact that I’ve seen it plenty of times, I’m happy to pay 2 euros to sit, with plenty of legroom and nobody nearby, next to a column in the last row of the upper tier, and stand up for a better view at the key intervals. I wasn’t completely hypnotized into am advanced spiritual state, as I’ve been sometimes at past performances of Parsifal, but then, I’ve got a lot on my mind these days, so this might have been the strongest Parsifal I’ve seen, even if I wasn’t fully receptive.

I won’t review all of the other operas I’ve seen this late season. But highlights were Gyöngyi Lukács’s Tosca with Attila Fekete as Cavaradossi and Alexandru Agache as an excellent Scarpia, played with more louche-ness and manipulative sanctimoniousness than usual, as well as somewhat less physical aggression (I am pretty sure God in fact intended for a Romanian to sing this role, which is probably just about as much fun as you can have on an opera stage). In a few weeks I’ll see Szilvia Rálik take on Tosca again. Szilvia or Gyöngyi? Gyöngyi or Szilvia?

Also, Budapest had its go at Tannhaüser, where the male leads of János Bándi and Tamás Busa, as Tannhaüser and Wolfram, if not up to Vienna standards, were still moving in the right direction. Of the females, Erika Gál gave us a delightful Venus after warming up for the first few minutes. Not to insult a grande dame of the Hungarian stage, but human typhoon Mária Temesi’s volume and presence was maybe about right for Brünnhilde at the Met, but was simply much too much for Elisabeth in Budapest. Big chunks of the audience ate it up though, presumably assuming that having to stick your fingers in your ears is the hallmark of a great dramatic soprano. And once again, the orchestra proved its magnificence, particularly the strings, with only the occasional hint of dodginess from those mischievous horns.

And finally, a Traviata that blossomed into greatness after starting out a little directionless in Act I, with Klára Kolonits as Violetta and Peter Balczó as Alfredo, not to mention the chorus, seeming a bit unsure about what to do with themselves. Even the dinner party scene seemed a bit like a too-early Sunday brunch. But then comes Act II, and out steps my man Anatolj Fokanov, with his magnificent booming, slightly nasal baritone, as Georges Germont, whereupon suddenly everyone realized they were on a stage and the whole thing clicked into a much higher gear as the other singers and later the chorus took up his lead. Act II ended up being one of the best bits of opera I’ve ever witnessed, and the audience also knew they had seen something special, demanding 6 or 7 minutes of curtain calls before the second intermission. The shorter and more melancholy Act III doesn’t have the same tension and drama as Act II, but the singers were in their groove now and I teared up a bit when Violetta finally left this unhappy world, which means they were doing something right. So this Traviata, together with Don Giovanni and Mefistofele, have been the real highlights of the season in Budapest this year So far, that is. The season doesn’t end until June, but with the improving weather even I can have too much of a good thing.

General Strike and Palm Sunday in Madrid

This January marked the sad end of Hungary’s national airline, Malév, which most people thought was a perfectly good airline with the disadvantage of being financially mismanaged in a tiny and equally financially mismanaged national market. Within minutes of the semi-sudden announcement, before even securing a deal with the recently expanded and now near-empty Ferenc Liszt airport, our new national carrier, Ryanair was advertising some rock bottom getting-to-know you rates to a large number of attractive European destinations. So I did a quick kilometer from home/forint calculation factored by average hours of sunlight in late March vis-á-vis the price of a beer in the destination city, and it turned out we would be visiting sunny Madrid for a long weekend for about 80 USD round trip each. And just in time too! I hadn’t been anywhere in ages, although an early spring in Hungary meant we wouldn't be experiencing a significant improvement weather-wise. 

This is our third trip to Spain, and first to the capital. Today it’s one of my favorite countries to visit but I might come from an American generation of liberal cultural establishment snobbism that once worshipped France and Italy, not caring so much for vitality, and looked at Spain with a bit of distaste as simultaneously the unreformed land of the Falange and a slightly less downscale version of Mexico. I’d always meant to go, but even though I’d read my Hemingway and always had a thing for Spanish wine, for some reason I never got really excited about the idea until I moved to Europe and heard glowing recommendations from various ex-pats who had lived or holidayed there. Also, a number of Hungarians of around my age or a few years older have fond memories from the late 80s, when they were free to leave the country but could only take a very limited amount of foreign currency with them, so they would buy a Eurail pass in forints and ride it to the end of the line in Spain, which was still a relatively cheap country, and live off bread and the knapsack full of sausages they had brought from home. Now Spain doesn’t seem cheap at all, especially Madrid, and especially if you are paid in forints!

Our first full day starts with a tour around the center. The first thing we notice is that Madrid is overrun with garbage. The second thing we notice is, what are all these cops in riot gear doing around the Puerta del Sol? And what does this word “Huelga” that everyone is chanting mean? “Huelga general” answers a friendly barman serving us cáfé con leche, in response to Moni’s “Che paso en la calle?” (she actually speaks some Spanish, whereas I just babble in my surprisingly effective pan-Romance mishmash peppered with bits of the Tijuana Toads). And there it is on the TV new scroll line “Huelga general” in Seville, Barcelona, Valencia… holy cow! the whole country’s on strike. 

Continuing our walk past the palace and back to Plaza Mayor, mobile units of strikers are calling the proletariat to arms, with a chant of "Hoy no se consume, hoy no se trabaja!" and towards noon (Spaniards don’t seem to like getting out of bed early, but I suppose that’s the whole point of a general strike) larger bands of communists, anarchists, and other malcontents were roaming the streets.

It’s surprising to see such a massive strike in a country with around 24 percent – and much higher for the young – unemployment: instead you would expect to see a general give-your-boss-a-hug day. But the strikers are, indeed, mostly young people, presumably university students, and they are protesting, it seems, not so much their working conditions, since most of them wouldn't have any work, but instead a set of no-doubt much-needed reforms instituted by the current government that will make their jobs, if they ever get one, much less cushy than they would have been in the past. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing all over Europe, I think, if not elsewhere, as the current situation unfolds. In general, I think the reforms are probably necessary, especially in a country like Spain whose real economy, no matter how far it has come, is still not that of a Denmark or even a France, but on the other hand, the kids have a point: this is more Generation XYZ funding of baby boomer profligacy.

The strikes are getting a little ugly now. The marchers are plastering red Huelga General stickers on storefronts and hectoring shopkeepers to shut their doors, which they almost all do, with an occasional scuffle breaking out in the process. McDonald’s, committed to feeding the masses, stands bravely open, covered with stickers, but KFC never even opened that morning (coz they’re chicken, hehe).

Then a horrible thought crosses our minds simultaneously: what if, on our first day in Spain, we get nothing to eat? We decide to hightail it from the center. 

At the Banco de España, there’s some graffiti but no real protesting, except some shouting cyclists. I think in most countries if you deface the reserve bank you would probably instantly have all of your identification numbers deleted and would spend the rest of your short miserable existence wandering the financial districts as a financial non-entity, searching the gutters for the odd dropped call option or bearer bond to keep body and soul together, but apparently in Spain they take such things in stride and this graffiti, like most of the stickers and other scribbles, was gone two days later. In Budapest you can still find political graffiti directed against Ferenc Gyurcsány, two prime ministerships ago.

In the Parque del Buen Retiro, people and squirrels are hard at work relaxing in spite of the strike, and on the far side of the park, where the residential neighborhoods start, everything is functioning normally, from what we can tell. We enjoy a pleasant (and inexpensive) lunch at a local café where the customers watch the strike on TV, shaking their heads disapprovingly as though it were taking place in some distant country, and not 2 kilometres away.

So we spend the rest of the day exploring the outer belt of downtown Madrid, where regular people live and play, up past the Plaza de España where Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (we would see the two of them again in Budapest a few days later in Budapest dancing with members of the Bolshoi in Minkus’ eponymous ballet) guarding Franco’s bizarre Edifio España luxury apartment building.

And some old-timers attempt to explain to us the joys of pétanque.

We walked the length of this elongated park that crosses the Príncipe Pio, the hill housing the French barracks during the Napoleonic war, and the site of Goya’s masterpiece, The Third of May 1808, one of the more impressive sights in the Prado, all the more so for being painted in 1814, and not 60 years later.

And then a well-deserved glass of fino as evening set in with sore feet. Except for a cheerful gang of anarchists, the protesters were now disbanded and, banners slumped over their shoulders, were scouring the streets hoping to find an open place to have their supper.

The next day we complete our tour of now peaceful old Madrid. One advantage of the strikes is that most people seemed to have taken Friday off too, making a long weekend of it, sparing our lungs quite a bit of exhaust fumes.

This is the place to have chocolate and churros, as the wall full of autographed international celebrity photos attests.

The now-demilitarized Plaza Mayor.

The palace (this isn’t the front façade, but I am a thrall to plinths).

And various pleasant streets and views. That evening we dined at Javier Bardem’s restaurant, Bardemcillo. I didn’t know who he was but Móni says I’ve seen him in lots of movies. I know who Penelope Cruz is though. She’s his main squeeze. Anyway, Javier and Penelope are fairly good cooks, although I wouldn’t say we tasted anything truly remarkable there, except maybe for the plate of elvers with garbanzos. And the staff is friendly.

Spanish blood pudding tastes exactly Hungarian blood pudding! Except we don’t dice it up like this or gussy it up with watercress and sprouts, and we charge about two-thirds less for it. Such are the lessons of value-added marketing we must learn from our brethren in the West.

Day 3 is spent on a day-trip to Toledo via the Atocha station (the site of the 2004 terrorist attack. What happens when NATO forces leave Afghanistan? Sadly, I’m pretty sure more of these.)

Toledo is sort of the obligatory day trip for first time visitors to Madrid. As medieval cities go, there are lots of more impressive one in Europe, but it’s fun to walk around here for an afternoon, more if you have an unusually strong interest in Spanish history from the Reconquista, El Greco, or Jewish Spain prior to the Inquisition. We walked down to the new town to get lunch in a regular café, rather than an overpriced tourist restaurant.

Our fourth and final day is Palm Sunday, the first day of Santa Semana, which one day I will have to experience in Spain in its totality. After duly watching palm fronds being marched around town and into churches, we spend the day in the Prado. And not only the Prado, because half of the Hermitage has also come to visit. We toured the Hermitage in St. Petersburg a few years back, but since chances aren’t bad I will never return to Russia (whereas I probably will to Madrid) we decided to do some catching up with those work too. Anyway, as can be imagined, it was total painting overload, but I did get to fully assimilate the Brueghels (esp. The Triumph of Death), the works of Bosch and most of the Goyas, but several thousand paintings later ran out of steam to fully appreciate the more subtle Spanish masters, Velazquez in paticular.

Oh well, next time, because Madrid has definitely made it onto my list of favorite cities. I think for a next trip to Spain I would like to start and end here an extended tour through the Basque Country, Asturias, and Galicia.

Budapest Walks: Erzsébetváros

Spring made a tentative appearance today so it's time to take a break from boring everyone with opera reviews. Saturday lunch (yes, it was stuffed cabbage!) was digested with a quick stroll around the neighborhood:  District VII, Erszébetváros, Elizabethtown, named after the Empress Elizabeth, wife of Franz Josef. This is the smallest district in Budapest, just over 2 km square, and the most densely packed of them all, with 60,000 people crammed into it. You can walk the perimeter in an hour. It's kind of a mix of regular Joes and better educated, but not necessarily better paid, classes, with a contingent of students and ex-pat loafers thrown in as well.

It's also probably the most vibrantly developing district in Budapest, with an increasingly cosmopolitan flavor. Except for my first year in Bp in 1999, when I lived in the somewhat staid area near the Parliament, I've lived in District VII, first at the downtown end and since then on the City Park end, and it's changed enormously over that time, with bright new restaurants, cafés, and specialty shops opening in the storefronts, which used to be more dominated more by workshops in various degrees of defunctness.

And the development is not just on the downtown end either. On our local shopping streets, like István utca above, our shopping street one block over, we have several Chinese restaurants, including the Chinese restaurant that in summer feeds busloads of happy Chinese tourists embarked on one of their surveys of all the Chinese restaurants of Europe. We have a decent sushi place, we have a new Russian restaurant, and a Russian grocery and an Italian grocery among other delicatessens. Lots of pizza of various levels of mediocrity. Flagrant plugs: the best pizza in Budapest, for my money, is New York Pizza and the best Chinese is Master Wang's, both of which are a little further afield. We have the best cevapcici in town here though!

(Can you tell I got a new high-res cell phone camera? The only problem is I haven't learned how to keep my finger off the lens while I'm taking pictures yet.)

This part of the district was built very rapidly in the last decades of the 19th century, when industrializing Budapest was one of the most quickly growing cities in Europe. To accommodate the new demand for housing, the district was built out according to a modern grid pattern, which gave it the nickname Chicago.

A good example is our neoclassical building, above, on a street named after a famous veterinarian (not many countries, I wager, name streets after veterinarians, even if the famous veterinarian's soul is blessed nightly by millions of contented healthy chickens all over the world. The veterinary university, which has quite a strong reputation, is on the other end of the street, and attracts students from all over Europe.) Like other buildings in the area, the house was built and owned by a single wealthy family that itself would have lived on the second floor (which we call the first floor). The ground floor would be given over to ateliers or shops. The flats in the upper floors were rented out to more humble tenants.

Like most of the buildings in the area, it still needs a coat of paint, although we got the plastering done a few years ago. Hungary has an extremely high-rate of homeownership by world standards, owing to the conjunction of collectivation policies during the communist period and privatization policies immediately afterwards, but many of these homes are owned by elderly or otherwise hard-up persons with no significant cash income to speak of, hence the funds for major refurbishments in a cooperative apartment building like this one, for which usually repairing the facade is the last priority, after the roof, fixtures etc., has to come from municipal grants, which gives our local chiefs the opportunity to cultivate the patronage networks they love so much. It's happening, but slowly. On the bright side, the municipal government seems to have put a big dent in our graffiti problem, which had gotten so completely out of hand a few years ago.

And then there's the Garay fiasco. This used to be a run-down covered market serving the nearby area. The previous Socialist mayor (each district has its own mayor, which isn't a particularly efficient way to run a metropolis), who was involved up to his eyeballs in various real estate schemes and spent a couple years in jail, much less than he deserved, arranged for it to be torn down and the property taken over by a developer who, in exchange for building a new market and fixing up the facades of the adjacent buildings, would be able to develop luxury flats in the upper floors. I don't know who wants a luxury flat in the slightly dodgy area two blocks from the main train station, but somehow the corrupt ex-mayor's wife ended up with a good chunk of them (this happens quite a lot in this country: our politicians live very modestly but their spouses and often young children turn out to be exceptionally successful business operators. The new mayor seems to have cleaned things up somewhat.) They tried to create a mini-shopping mall on the ground and first floors in addition to the food market in the basement, but completely miscalculated the demand for retail space for what was, at the end of the day, a neighborhood market, and at least half of it remains empty including the entire upstairs floor. The food market does a brisk business though, mostly on Friday or Saturdays, and I'm on a friendly basis with many of the merchants. We'll visit there one day, maybe when I show you how to make a stuffed cabbage.

I've always like this eclectic building. Reminds me of the Kennedy-Warren on Connecticut Avenue in Washington done up Budapest style, and I wonder what it looks like inside.

The Square of Rose's Church, dedicated to St. Elizabeth (who wasn't an empress), and designed by the same architect who gave us our wacky overdone neo-gothic parliament building. Angelina Jolie and frequent Budapest visitor husband Brad had it blocked off with sandbags for a couple days last year when filming their Bosnian war film In The Land of Blood and Honey, which I'll maybe review here later, and you can see it clearly in the last few minutes of the film. I'm not sure there are too many Catholic churches in that part of eastern Bosnia where the film takes place, at least not dating from the era of the Austrian occupation, but who am I to nitpick with Angelina?

Now we're crossing the Grand Boulevard, which encloses the downtown area of the city. Behind the ubiquitous 4-6 tram is the New York Palace, which houses the New York coffeehouse, where the city's  artists and writers used to amuse each other around the turn of the century. Prices have increased considerably since then, but if you don't mind shelling out 1000 forints for a coffee it's a nice place to sit surrounded by frescoes and baldachins.

On the other side of the boulevard, we enter the older part of the district and the character, atmosphere and scale all change. The streets are narrower, curvier and darker. This is the old Jewish quarter, the focal point of the more religious and more working class components of Budapest's Jewish pre-war society, which is showing lots of signs of recovery today. It's also full of pubs and the outdoor beer gardens built into courtyards that should be opening for the season in a month or so.

The Great Synagogue is probably the chief tourist attraction in the 7th District. The largest synagogue in Europe, with a Jewish museum and holocaust memorial attached and, through a twist of fate, the birthplace of Theodore Herzl, conceiver of the modern Israeli state. I used to live right around the corner on the street on the left, but I only had a view of pigeons nesting in a lichthof -- a lightwell (one of the many German words dealing with urban life that made it into Budapest Hungarian). My next door neighbor was the head Lubavitcher rabbi for all of Hungary and he got the panorama windows to liven up his divinely ordained all-night boogie parties. Good thing no one lived under him. Where is the second largest synagogue in Europe? Answer: Pilsen. 

I've always like this prominently placed block of 1930s flats which I think doesn't have a proper name. Just the Madách Square flats. The arcades house cafés and a theater.

Now we're heading back out toward the Grand Boulevard on Király (King) Street. This is another street that used to be a little spooky despite running parallel to Andrássy Avenue. It's been fixed up (more or less, watch out for loose flagstones) and now houses some of the boutique spillover from Andrássy, art galleries and more pubs.

The Gozsdu courtyards are a series of 6 courtyards runing between Király street and the next street over. Originally designed as workshops and housing for local craftsmen, now they host more boutiques and pubs. Seriously, you wouldn't know the country has been teetering on the brink of bankrupcy to walk around this neighborhood. Walking through is kind of a thrill, although difficult to capture adequately in a photograph. It was even more thrilling before it was fixed up and there was nobody there at night except a chained up german shepherd to welcome you.

And back across the Grand Boulevard. Here is the city's first - or is it second? - Starbucks. I don't know what one of the joint (sort of) capitals of the Empire that invented the coffee house needs a Starbucks, but maybe that's what they think everywhere else too.

A few blocks up, at Lövölde "Arsenal" Square, where they used to keep the weoponry, Király Street turns into a bucolic country lane with villas, churches and schools on either side. There are embassies too, but only on the 6th District (Terézváros) side, which is known as the embassy district. For some reason the embassies are afraid to encroach on our side of the street.

The Lutheran High School was responsible for educating Nobel-winning mathematician Eugene Wigner, Nobel-winning economist János Harsányi, and Nobel-losing inventor of modern computing John von Neumann, all of whom I'm pretty sure weren't Lutherans, as well as numerous other luminaries, some of whom may have been.

And in case they felt unstimulated, atomic physicist Leo Szilard was growing up next door. I kind of like this house. Today the Liszt Music Academy is using it so little hope it will go on the market any time soon.

Now we've walked enough so it's time to pick up some cakes at Katalin Cukrászda, my favorite pastry shop in the area. Many of the cukrászdas truck in lacklustre cakes from industrial bakeries somewhere, but this is the real thing. A little bit pricier, but the crowds waiting on weekend afternoons seem to know the difference too. That's Katalin serving out the cakes behind the counter and husband Géza the chef on the right. I'd like 2 Pándi sour cherry cakes, please, and 1 Sacher, 1 melon cake and a "Katalin" cake! (I'm not going to eat them all myself.)

Mozart Marathon at the Palace of Arts

It looks like winter's about over here, a fairly mild winter despite a 2-week cold snap that supplied the international news machine with lots of photos of people and bodies of water looking frostier than usual in the middle of Europe, and before too long I might even venture past the city limits of Budapest for the first time in months, or at least my little winter world of the 7th, 8th and 13th districts (and now swimming laps twice a week in the 14th), and find something with more widespread appeal than operas and classical concerts to write about. But for now, that's what I got.

But everyone loves Mozart, right? Greatest composer who ever lived. Actually, I place him second after Beethoven on the grounds that Mozart (and Bach at no. 3) were, partly by virtue of some personal audio pipeline to the cosmic spheres, essentially elevating the music of their own times to towering new heights, whereas Beethoven, the human untouched by angels, grunting and shoving, scratching and kicking, virtually single-handedly birthed a new musical era. But being the second-greatest composer since Australopithecus first rattled some dry bones together is nothing to sneeze at either.

One wonders if it was Iván Fischer's or some marketing guy's brilliant idea to get the top symphony orchestras and other musical talent in Hungary together each year to run a morning-to-night program of mini-concerts each late winter dedicated to a single composer, for which we've had a Tchaikovsky Marathon, a Schubert Marathon, and a Dvorak Marathon, for all of which I always seemed to manage to be out town. And to sell the tickets for each really inexpensively (approx. 3 euros for any seat in the cavernous Palace of Arts Béla Bártok Concert Hall, buy 3 get one free). So when tickets went on sale one day last fall I was all ready except I got hit with some editing to do that morning and when I finally looked at the ticket situation early afternoon, the Requiem, to be performed by the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Fischer himself as the crowning highlight of the evening, had infuriatingly already sold out. But no matter, there was plenty to choose from, and since the whole thing was simulcast on our very own Bartók Rádió, so you can, at least for the next few weeks, listen to it all on their website while improving your Hungarian right here:

http://hangtar.radio.hu/bartok#!#2012-02-26

Which is how I got to hear the requiem in the end. (Most of the performances actually start a few minutes after their schedule times, so you have to fast forward through some babbling in Hungarian, and they really are babbling).

It was also interesting to hear how the various orchestras stack up against the other at close quarters. Perhaps in the Requiem you can hear how the BFO deserves its reputation as a world class orchestra and from the tempos he uses, Iván Fischer's as one of the world's most inventive conductors. If you live in a bastion of civilization you can hear them on one of their many tours sooner or later, or you can just come to Budapest. It's always a pleasure to witness them perform.

Also I think of world-class stature, especially in the liveliness and subtlety of their strings, is the Budapest Phiharmonic Society, the opera house's orchestra and therefore my home team, which also plays symphonic music when the mood strikes them. Here at 17:00 under the baton of white-maned János Kovács ("John Smith") they play the overture to the magic flute and the Jupiter symphony. Here I confess to another mistake, which was, in my effort to test out acoustics in different parts of the hall, I got tickets way in the back for this concert, whereas for this one we should have been sitting in the "organ seats" a few feet behind the orchestra to get the effect I heard Zubin Mehta describe once with respect to the convergence of themes at the end of the Jupiter, supposedly at the time of writing the most complex symphony ever composed to date, of the entire universe spinning around you, like some early Pink Floyd concert (he didn't say that last part).

For the 19:00 performance of the clarinet concerto and Ch’io mi scordi di te, we did sit in the organ seats for a great view of the soloists' backs, but I was impressed both with them and the Pannon Philharmonic from Pécs under András Vass. I've also always liked the clarinet concerto which shows a humorous side, written in Mozart's final year when he was supposedly staring oblivion in the eye with the Requiem and the mysticism of the Magic Flute, at least if you believe Milos Forman. On the other hand maybe things were starting to pick up and he just happened to get sick and die. Happened all the time.

The matinee performances by the Hungarian Radio Orchestra and Hungarian State Railways Orchestra were a notch down from these previous groups, a little harsh sounding, although the soloists themselves were perfectly fine. Judging by the names of their sponsors they are probably a bit starved for funds, although I've seen the locomotive fiddlers do solid work with lighter fare in the past.

A lot of us downtown cosmopolitan types don't like the Palace of Arts and the adjoining National Theater for complex political reasons dating from its fitful construction during the current government parties first stab at governing the country in the late 90s - the arts and politics are nearly always deeply connected in Hungary and this remains an ongoing story that I might discuss some other time - but it's starting to grow on me as architecture. I can think of no other examples of a modern public buildings that reach this level of lavishness in Budapest. Remind me to do a survey here sometime of post-1989 buildings in Budapest that I find to have real merit. It won't be terribly long.

But here, at least, the acoustics are great, as long as your neighbor doesn't start flipping through his program and humming along during the performance, it's helping revitalize this formerly industrial embankment of the Danube, and it's got one of the best views in town.

It really is a European-level arts center. I should tear myself away from my opera house a little more often and check out what's going on down the river.

Mefistofele

I hadn’t known much about Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele, but am now mightily impressed with parts of it, like the prologue in heaven above, although still a bit puzzled with others, despite having seen it twice now. This is one of our big-bucks new productions – of which we get several each year – intended to raise the profile of the opera, which seem to be largely entrusted to the compelling direction of Balázs Kovalik, who together with designer Csaba Antal also brought us Elektra as set in one of Budapest’s 19^th century bathhouses a few years ago. Actually this production premiered last year, but for some reason I didn’t get a good opportunity to see it then.

As an operatic work, it’s uneven in its brilliance, a bit like Goethe’s Faust itself (Yes, I read it way back when. Both parts. In English.) Which is I suppose what you would expect from an Italian Wagnerite who, despite being trained in music, composed little other music and is mainly known as Verdi’s librettist for Otello, Falstaff, and Simon Boccanegra. Also, you can tell that it’s been cropped from a much longer work, which is perhaps why it doesn’t hang together so well. 


But where it’s brilliant, it’s brilliant, and also provides an opportunity for a visual feast. The opera, after spending so much money on this production, kindly posted high-grade clips of the two grander scenes. Both are well worth watching on full-screen. Up top is the prologue in heaven where Mephistopheles makes his bet for Faust’s soul with God, via God’s middle management, who then proceed to sing the praises of the boss with great vigor. The little kids are the cherubini, the souls of children who died across the ages flitting around the cosmos, including one in a Bart Simpson shirt who apparently left this vale of tears circa 1991. I’m not sure who the scruffy guy getting shaken down is. An earthly penitent? With opera on this scale you get the sense that subplots are being worked into the fabric of the scene.

The provocative second clip is from the Witches’ Sabbath in Act II, recast as an average Saturday night at your local Budapest pub. There’s a lot going on here, including scantily clad dancers to please every gender and persuasion, some of which doesn’t show up on this clip. Declaring his contempt for the wicked world and his intention to destroy it, Mephistopheles, with a knowing grin, hoists the EU flag. I hope this doesn’t affect our funding. Also there's some cocaine being blown on stage. 

The opera sort of loses its way after this, much like Goethe’s version, although Faust’s new love Marghereta (played by Gabrielle Létay Kiss and Zsuszanna Bazsink, who was the stronger of the two. I saw both casts) gets an intense death row scene before being converted into Helen of Troy and the action switches to Ancient Greece and some kind of magic tanning booths. Mefistofele, which is supposedly one of the great bass-baritone roles, is played competently by Gábor Bretz and more than competently by András Palerdi. Faust himself seems somewhat inconsequential as a singing role, which is presumably intentional since he’s no longer even the nominal star of the show. 

Winter Opera Round-up (1)

Happy New-ish Year. It has been an interesting winter contemplating Hungary’s absurd political situation. (For the record, I think the reports circulating through the international press indicating that we are in danger of becoming another Belarus are in large measure echo-chamber hype. Our leaders are far too incompetent to successfully erect an authoritarian state. The reports that we are in danger of becoming very broke, very fast are in fact, however, quite true. Which puts us in the company of some of the finest countries in the world, at least.)

Fortunately the Budapest opera house still seems to be fully funded, so I’ve been going quite often to watch people being beheaded, stabbed, carted off to hell, consumed by tuberculosis and hauled off to jail for 8 days for insulting a state official, all of which puts our present woes into a more manageable perspective and helps stave off the wintertime blues.

In December we start with Turandot, an opera I’ve always found a bit overrated, but since we don’t have dramatic-ish soprano Szilvia Rálik in too many home-field performances this season and I had never seen her in this, one of her signature roles, I went to see how she handled it. Which was just fine – she opens her mouth and fires forth a perfectly controlled barrage of Chinese ice princess. Except it’s a brief barrage, which is one reason I’m not such a big Turandot fan – like relegating your team’s ace starting pitcher to the bullpen. 

Here she is in the only Youtube version I could find, singing in Hungarian at the Szeged Opera Festival a few years ago, presumably because our country yokel cousins cannot be presumed to have the mastery of Italian shared by all true Budapesters. But you get the idea what kind of power she has.

János Bándi fluffed Calaf’s Nessun Dorma, which probably ruined his day. Szilvia had to drag him out to take his bows. He sounded like he might have had a bit of a cold, although I wouldn’t have enjoyed it anyway since the student couple sitting next to me, suddenly confronted a bit they recognized from the recordings of the fat dead Italian guy, decided to ecstatically point this fact out to each other and inadvertently the nearest four rows as well, necessitating a shushing. Seriously, this is getting worse, and the tourists making smartphone videos. From now on until I can afford real my own box I’m staking out seats based solely on minimizing the number of knuckleheads in my immediate vicinity. Who cares if I can see or not?

Then we have Don Giovanni. At the Budapest opera, most of the Mozart I’ve seen over the years has turned out a bit uninspired, but this was a new production with a vibrant youngish cast (who actually looked like plausible candidates for either end of a seduction procedure), and turned out to be the best performance I’ve seen in Budapest thus far this season. Excellent pacing and all of the principals bringing their characters to life, especially István Kovács as a formidable Don. I got chills in the statue finale. If there was a weak spot it was Alik Abdukayumov’s slightly mushy enunciation of Leporello’s Mille e Tre in the first act before he had warmed up properly, but he got that fixed up later and brought a compelling depth to the character, who does indeed require a bit of acting ability.

And a workmanlike pre-Christmas performance of Aida with no real standouts, despite my man Anatolij Fokanov holding down Amonasro. It seems to me the most memorable parts are in the chorus, anyway, or maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood that day.

Banging in the new year we have a cold wintry performance of La Bohème, which always turns out really well here, in my experience. Our resident Mimi, Ilona Tokody, who has sung the role opposite any major tenor you can think of over the years was splendid as usual, threading the tricky Mimi tightrope of filling an entire opera house with your lung power while succumbing to tuberculosis.

Exciting in this performance was Rebeka Bobanj, a young “South Country” (from the Hungarian minority in what is now northern Serbia) soprano making what I believe was her first appearance at the HSO as Musetta. Her voice has this interesting full but reedy quality that I would like to hear more of in the future. Here she is performing Musetta’s Waltz on the television for the good people of, again, Szeged, starting at 0:40, although the self-important urgently-scored lead-in for the local news program is also good for a laugh. If something ever happens in Szeged, these guys will be on top of it on a hurry (just teasing, Szeged. You are not yokel-ish at all. You are very pleasant town with a level of musical culture superior to that of even Kecskemét.)

Then, a fun performance of Die Fledermaus, where they sing in German and switch to Hungarian for the spoken bits. A standout was actor Péter Vida in the non-singing role of Frosch the drunken jailer, with a contemporary shtick of high-speed comic patter and wordplay that went over really well. When Hungarian wits go into rapid-fire wordplay mode I can only claim partial comprehension, but what I got was funny. Éva Várhelyi made an excellent Prince Orlovsky. The ball doubled as a real-life 80th birthday party for long-time director Miklós Szinetár with gifts presented and ditties sung. Happy Birthday Teacher, Sir!

And because not every day can be opera day (or can’t it?), Andi for Christmas got us tickets to see funk-rock band Magna Cum Laude. I don’t listen to an awful lot of rock these days, but this is the kind of creative, lyrical upbeat Hungarian band that I can get behind. Here is charming front man Misi Mező working his gypsy magic on the Pálinka Song, the unofficial anthem of us pálinka aficionados everywhere. Balkan brass sections make everything better.

A Visit to the Village Distillery

In rural Hungary it's common to make a strong brandy called pálinka out of the season's fruit, usually from the bounty of plums, apricots, pears, cherries and apples that the countryside produces every year. You can make it out of any fruit, really, except maybe a tomato, but those are the most common ones. There is also a grappa made from leftover crushed wine grapes, which is sort of a separate sub-category. Pálinka is similar to schnapps (which is usually a bit milder) and (more so) to the rakia and slivovice they make across the Balkans. Fruit here in a good season has a distinctive succulence, which gets passed on in the distillation. Quality ranges from untaxed and undrinkable (unless you want a monster headache) moonshine made in home stills to artisanal commercial varieties that can be as complex and expensive as high-end whiskies or brandies.

a hardworking apple tree

Péter's (Móni's sister's long-time boyfriend) father Tamás has a weekend dacha in Diósjenő, in a valley about an hour north of Budapest, with a few fruit trees (2 apples, 1 plum, 1 pear - apricots don't grow so well this far north) in the yard. Since none of the ladies in the family make jam, the considerable excess gets washed, cored, de-seeded and, its blemished bits discarded, tossed into one of several air-tight plastic barrels to ferment until it's ready to take to the village distillery to make a quite powerful but somehow smooth elixir that will chase away the winter colds and other agues of those who are fortunate enough to receive a glass or bottle.

And this is what we are doing this December morning. This will foreseeably be Tamás's last batch ever, since the aging trees are on their last legs and he's ready to retire as a pálinka hobbyist anyway. It's quite a bit of work, especially for someone who doesn't drink much of it himself. I had helped with processing the fruit on a couple occasions over the last two years - and gone on a couple plum raids around the neighborhood, since fallen fruit (or nearly-fallen) fruit by the roadside outside fenced areas (there's a lot of it all over in season) is considered fair game. Once we wandered onto some unmarked private property and got into a standoff with a troop of local peasants, until we convinced them that it wasn't their pumpkins we were after. They didn't care about the plums. In fairness, crop theft is a major problem in rural areas and, among other unfortunate effects, greatly contributes to tensions between gypsies and non-gypsies in such places. But fallen plums don't count.

Anyway, Tamás had long ago promised that when the final batch was ready go, he would take me to the distillery to watch. Most larger villages have such a facility, usually close to the railroad tracks, like this one, since the trains don't complain about the smell. You pay the professional distiller to cook up your mash to a specified strength of alcohol. Of course, he has a meter on his machine and you have to pay the excise taxes (the revenuers are very strict about this and check for undocumented booze regularly) in addition to the distillery fee, so it's not the cheapest way to get juiced, but he knows what he's doing and you get what you pay for in terms of quality. This is in contrast to home distilling, which, seemingly the most pressing issue facing the government for several months last year, has been recently legalized in small quantities (they were doing it anyway, in small quantities or otherwise, and selling much of it illicitly to the hard up), where, as István the distiller put it, "they don't know where it starts and ends and can't reach anything like our level of quality" - referring to the heads and tails, the beginning and end of the distillation process that you have to throw out because they are full of nasty headache chemicals, among other flaws. I don't think the moonshiners are too selective about the quality of the fruit they throw in the barrel either. Don't drink it!

mash

István is very busy this time of year, with the summer's fruit fully fermented and cold winter nights ahead. So he calls the shots. He tells you when he's got time to cook your mash, which is why I had to get up at 4:30 on a Monday morning to drive up to Diósjenő. He tells you when to go outside and split firewood (I ordinarily enjoy splitting firewood, but only after a good night's sleep. But I did my best without hacking my foot off.). The four barrels had already been brought over a few days earlier -- 400 kg of fermented fruit, with a bit of sugar added at the end to bring up the alcohol content a bit more (you're not supposed to do this with commercial pálinka, which by regulation is supposed to be only fruit). We patiently await the previous customer's grappa to finish trickling out, which István pours into jerry cans, After rinsing out the pot (surprisingly little residue, which seems to end up, presumably legally, in the brook outside) he and Tamás hoist in the first barrel. (I helped too after taking my photo).

And then this pot still

sends the vapors from the mash through the pipes overhead over to one of these electric blue things which I think in English are called a column still, which is much more clever than the pot still and much less picturesque.

Then you can leave the column still to do its job and go for a coffee and a wander around the wonders of  Nográd county, which I will cover in some later post. And when you come back, out is pouring the Pálinka. 39 litres of it!

István's little alcohol-content-measuring device said it was 47%, which is just right. It can come out much stronger, in which case you add distilled water to get it to the correct strength.

The pálinka goes into giant demijohns. It has to sit for a few months before the flavors marry. Right now it would just taste like something out of a chem lab. To some of it Tamás will add dried plums and apricots, and let it sit even longer, which gives a sweeter, richer taste.

Now I need to get my own tree!