It has been a very long time since I have heard music so alien
to my sense of what music should be about. This extends to the
cryptogrammatic elements over which Czech-born composer Kryštof
Mařatka lavishes such precision in the chamber version
of his Harp Concerto, here - therefore - called Praharphona
Sextet. The cryptogram question is too convoluted to get
into, and seems to me as relevant as Eliot’s mucking about in
the notes to The Waste Land. The purpose is twofold;
to bamboozle and belittle. To bamboozle through crypto-profundity
and obscurantism, and to belittle through the certain knowledge
that your reader, or listener, could not possibly understand
what you’re going on about – and will thus feel inferior and
excluded.
Each movement of the sextet carries a bizarre series of words,
letters, symbols and the like, all supposedly related to Prague,
the city where the composer was born. We are perhaps aided thus
to chart the music’s progress, or narrative, to understand where
Charles University, or Kafka, or defenestration or the Jewish
Quarter, or ‘Re-Catholicism’, or whatever, appear in the course
of these movements. Of course they do no such thing. The pitchless,
weird, scattered wisps of music, the off-colour percussion,
and diffuse sense of direction are narrative-free. There are
moments of reprieve; bell chimes, and an urgent rhythmic section
– apparently to do with thoughts of the Czechoslovak state tourist
office, C(edok, in authoritarian days. But it seems rather excessive
to append what is called in Harry Halbreich’s somewhat collaborationist
notes ‘obtuse goose stepping’, to a mere travel agency. To an
army, maybe, but not a travel agency, surely. The anti-Communist
dig is a humbug here.
Hypnózy is a 2006 Wind Quintet, divided into what the
composer calls ‘sittings’ or ‘sessions’ - what you and I might
call ‘movements’. There are five of them, whatever they are.
At least there are no fatuous obscurities to divert one from
the music pure and simple. There is some grumpy fanfare-like
brass writing, fast tonguing flute, moments that sound vaguely
Middle Eastern; others that remind one of the QE2 in the fog.
I am astonished at the dedication of the musicians, who receive
a solid round of applause from the student audience at the Paris
Conservatoire.
The setting is appropriate. Because in the end, let’s face it,
this is music for academics and other musicians. It’s not for
audiences. For Halbreich, who has written wonderful books –
not least on Honegger – to call Mařatka ‘a free creator
in the wake of his great predecessor Leoš Janįc(ek’ is breathtaking,
albeit a sly piece of publicity. What that fierce Moravian Nationalist
and anti-Germanic Russophile would make of Mařatka is probably
best left unguessed.
Jonathan Woolf
Sandrine Chatron (harp) ¹