Schubert NOW! is a collaboration by all three of them, and can be looked on as an innovative continuation of a previous CD. As I mentioned above, in 2018 Harcsa and Razvalyaeva launched a joint project in which they performed songs with piano accompaniment by Claude Debussy with the voice and harp. After several successful performances, the idea arose that the duo become a trio, and they were joined by jazz guitarist and sound sculptor Márton Fenyvesi: the result of their experimenting together was the album Debussy NOW! recorded for the BMC Records label and released in 2021. In order to understand the true value of this new album, we need to look back at the special features of their earlier performances based on Debussy compositions.
Even in its original form, Harcsa and Razvalyaeva’s duo project was of great value: to the French master’s songs they merely made tiny alterations that had their roots in non-classical voice technique and harp playing technique; however, for some works, from the typical motifs and chord sequences, they created improvisatory interludes, while for others, they extended the time of the accompanying formulae, and complemented them with melodic and rhythmic ornaments familiar from jazz. Fenyvesi thus stepped into a sovereign musical structure functioning according to its own rules, and his task was primarily, through the transformation of the live performance of the songs via electronic modulation, effects, and filters, to create an acoustic texture in realtime, simultaneously with the performance of the original compositions. Although in certain passages, Fenyvesi, a jazz guitarist, took up his instrument, Debussy NOW! is primarily based on the voice-harp duo and the possible electronic acoustic clouds created from the sound of the two, i.e. it builds on the dichotomy, the contrast and binarity of the two media. Despite this, one of the greatest strengths of his work here is that he accomplished the most difficult task: he took the duality on which the concept was based, and resolved it, making the final acoustic outcome organic. The new CD, based on Schubert lieder, was made with a different working method. The Harcsa–Razvalyaeva–Bolcsó trio worked out the concept as a team from the beginning: from selecting the songs, to defining the precise role and function of the electronics, down to the final decision on the order of the songs. The resulting peculiarly individual Liedkreis is thus genuine chamber music, in the most complete, most noble sense of the word. Here the electronics is not limited to the transformation of the voice and the harp, but it has an independent role of its own: from the musical texture of the Schubert songs it unpacks and highlights the elements it wishes to use. As a result, the harp no longer has the task of simply playing the piano part as written in its original form, but together with and complementing the electronic sounds, synthesizers, and pre-programmed sequences, creating varied relations of subordinacy and superiority, it plays the passages latent in Schubert’s music, but which in this form can only be heard here and now.
The new working method, and the musical material, radically different from Debussy’s style, considerably influenced the possible role of improvisation. From the very first moment, Schubert NOW! contains far fewer passages based on improvisation, for the artists sensed the level and manner of inner differentiation in the Romantic lied, and they wisely drew the conclusions of their experience: the relatively dense harmonic rhythms of Schubert’s Lieder mean that only to a limited extent are they suitable for providing the basis for larger-scale, improvisatory panels. Artistic transcription, the new readings of the material developed from the magnification of certain musical gestures, are achieved via other musical building blocks or factors, resulting in solutions of great character, and sometimes quite surprising.
The Wanderers Nachtlied that opens the CD uses the technique of extreme reduction: it omits the entire piano accompaniment, leaving only the vocal line as a monody. Listeners who already know the song will probably hear the original harmonies coupled with the vocal melody in their imagination or musical memory; those who encounter the work for the first time can marvel at how the contour of the melody is valid independent of any accompaniment, and has an essential quality. Dispensing with the harmonic relations creates the possibility of a new dimension: the voice is enveloped in an acoustic atmosphere compiled from various sounds of nature that do not actually exist in this form. The relation between the inner self and the surrounding world, the “wanderer motif” is thus given an shape that deploys specific visual associations, evoking the similar endeavours of German Romantic painting (particularly Caspar David Friedrich). The song Meeres Stille achieves a similar effect by other means: the edge of the long sustained chords of the original piano part is blurred, dissolved, within a slowly undulating electronic texture, thus ending tempo and metre in the traditional sense, and creating a sense of infinite timelessness.
The interpretation of the two songs above works by a principle of reduction; the opposite approach is taken in the songs Aufenthalt, Die Stadt, Auf dem Flusse, Ihr Bild, Die Krähe, and particularly in Die Doppelgänger. In these movements one of the musical components is enlarged, emphasized, or radically reinterpreted – naturally never self-indulgently, but setting out from the qualities of the emotional contents and meaning of the text, and always keeping them firmly in sight. Aufenthalt and Auf dem Flusse effectively unpack the opportunities inherent in the original structure: the relentless continuous triplet movement of the former song, the clockwork rattling, are created only by electronics (a sequencer), counterpointed and complemented by double octave expansive harp motifs; in the latter, compared to the shape and structure of the original, every section is even richer, at certain moments giving an even symphonic effect, heightening the expressivity and dramatic power of the text. The songs Die Stadt, Ihr Bild, and Doppelgänger go even further, when they exploit the rhythmic characters present either latently or explicitly (but undoubtedly there) in the piano parts: one thing can be said for sure: these three songs come the closest to the pulsation of today’s contemporary electronic pop songs and their primary effects. Naturally, making the rhythm more striking is only one among other more refined techniques, suffice to think of the vocal and harp improvisations, equally well-placed in both songs. Extemporisation appears in other functions in the songs on this CD, for instance, in the introduction to In der Ferne its role is as a means of shaping the form. The quality of the sound and its internal economy as an aesthetic category with an independent value is part of the musical communication of Schubert NOW!. A peculiar, menacing atmosphere is created by the vocal improvisation based on the imitation of the cawing of Die Krähe (the crow), which works its complex effect with another solution deriving from the text. Müller’s poem gives an evocative description of the crow wheeling above the wanderer’s head: the constantly descending runs of the piano part in the Schubert song move, in Razvalyaeva’s interpretation, in a broader ambit than the range in the original version, in other words, in this performance, the acoustic reality of the accompaniment (the crow accompanying the wanderer) really does wheel above the singer, then at the descent into the grave it swoops down to a much lower register than in the original song. The last song of the album, Des Baches Wiegenlied, has a particularly special atmosphere. The monotony of tinkling sounds reminiscent of a run-down music box, accompanied by the crackling of a record player, slowly but surely runs its course, closing and melting into itself – or to be faithful to the text of the poem: smothering into itself – both the singer and the harp: and bizarrely, this creates perfect harmony.