Ivan Vandor Musique de chambre Ceccanti Quatuor Klimt - STR37083 - Contemporain

In a fine essay on Ivan Vandor Cristiano Vecchi speaks of “landscapes without history”, while Mario Bortolotto, the first critic to offer an insightful exegesis of the various historical avant-gardes, Viennese included, speaks of “otherness”, but I beg to differ. Vandor, at least the most recent Vandor, lives, like Kurtag, in history; though unlike his fellow Hungarian composer, he has no love of citation. Mitteleurope’s presence is constantly evoked, but as echo or resonance, not as literal quotation. The neo-classical passion for the ancient is absent; but glimmers of a lost world with which Vandor is in dialogue are present. After the experimental research of his youth and the improvisations with the group Musica Elettronica Viva, Vandor took refuge in an ecstatic limbo, like that of the Duo for viola and piano, or the cello pieces included in this CD. The syncretism of the Klavierquartett is remarkable, as is the emotional cantabile, close to Bartokian elegy, of the string Trio, the masterpiece of this collection. Time is recurrently held in suspension, as in Webern’s Bagatellen op. 9. There is no trace in Vandor’s work of the Tibetan Buddhism which fascinated him as a musicologist; his is a personality with two autonomous souls not engaged in dialogue; so much so that all facile ethnic referencing or orientalism is avoided. His is a solitary world, suspended on the brink of interiority. Listening to this music reveals a touching spiritual joy. Vandor is an untimely Maestro. In dialogue with the shadows, he is not afraid to recreate the past, to live in lyrical intimacy the return of the forgotten.