Violinist Ernst Kovacic is playing a customarily eclectic programme of music on his latest visit to Ireland, reports Michael Dervan
Few visiting soloists with Irish orchestras have shown quite the eclecticism of taste revealed over the years by the violinist Ernst Kovacic. He has played works from the European musical mainstream by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven and directed Viennese concerts with the Ulster Orchestra. But he's also played concertos by Elgar and Britten - highly unusual pieces to find in the repertoire of an Austrian musician - as well as by Barber, Korngold and Weill.
He's back in Dublin and Limerick next weekend for a Viennese programme with the Irish Chamber Orchestra. But it's a Viennese programme with a difference, perhaps reflecting the extra perspective Kovacic has from not being a native of Vienna: although his musical training is Viennese, he was born in Kapfenberg, in the south-east Austrian state of Styria. With the ICO he ranges beyond the obvious names of the 19th century - Schubert and Lanner are there along with the Strauss family - and ventures in to the late 20th century with Kurt Schwertsik's Möbelmusik-Klassisch of 1994.
I am meeting Kovacic in a café in Vienna with many of the city's great musical institutions and venues within a few minutes' walk, so it seems obvious to ask one of those simple but not necessarily readily answerable questions. What is it that makes the music that people associate with Viennese concerts so Viennese? "I could try to answer at different levels. What happened in the development of these composers' works was that the music was danced. Of course in the 18th century there was never a dance with close body contact. So the development of the waltz in dancing, which did have close body contact . . . was a revolution, I guess."
A report from the turn of the 19th century gives a clear idea of how the new eroticism of the waltz was viewed. "The male dancers grasped the long dresses of their partners, so that they would not drag and be trodden upon, and lifted them high, holding them in this cloak which brought both bodies under one cover, as closely as possible against each other, and in this way the whirling continued in the most indecent positions; the supporting hand lay firmly on the breasts, at each movement making little lustful pressures; the girls went wild and looked as if they would drop."
People not only danced at the concerts given by Joseph Lanner and the Johann Strausses, father and son, Kovacic points out: they ate, drank and heard other sorts of music.
"Strauss was the first who brought some Wagner to the Viennese audience, not the royal opera. He was an information centre about European music, actually. It was a very strange mixture of increasing quality of the structure of the pieces, of the craftsmanship of the composer, coming, I guess, through these works he performed by Wagner. And still there was the need to entertain people and to bring them to dance. I think this kind of swinging element is possibly something which was developed here."
Kovacic points to "the very close relationship to folk music" and the need to make people want to move through the music "that developed and developed and developed. But it was never lost in this time. Even in the Strauss operettas you find these brilliant dances. It always goes in to the legs, as we say".
There's a great mystique about Viennese music as it's played in Vienna. Is the playing of Viennese musicians really that different from that of others? "I think I would recognise them. If you go abroad all the orchestras know that the accompaniment of waltzes anticipates the second beat. If you play this in Vienna you don't think of doing it. It just happens. Very often abroad you notice that people do it: they really think they have to do it. And then it's a little bit inflexible. It's not always possible, of course, for the melody lines above sometimes need a very straight rhythm.
"But there's also the articulation and the special flow of melody building and singing, which is a little bit different and which comes from Mozart. The phrasing is connected with the language also. These composers spoke Austrian language.
"On the other hand, I have to say, the performances abroad are very good. I'm very happy always. But I think I could recognise a Viennese performance. I guess it's like hearing a fiddler in Ireland: they have this kind of phrasing and bowing technique. They have it in the blood. They have done it for generations. It's just easy, and they don't think about it. It's just happening.
"There is another element which is very important. These waltzes by Strauss, they have always some sort of psychological meaning. It very often has to do with the relationship of women and men, courting. It's always playing with dramatic situations, opera stuff, like in Mozart violin concertos, in the middle part of the first movements, it's always drama, it's always theatre.
"There are characters, and these characters are in confrontation, or they find a way together. It always has some meaning; it's not just dancing. This is very strong in Strauss. So, in the big waltzes, when you have introduction, then waltz one, two, three, sometimes four - in the old waltzes they had five waltzes, then the coda - each waltz has a special character. And they have two melodies, and each of these two melodies in each waltz are so different, show a different kind of human behaviour.
"The more I play these and conduct these the more I find he must have imagined certain people, caricatured them. He was looking at human behaviour and expressing it musically."
The tradition of Viennese music represented in concerts abroad is a dead one. Laurent Wagner's recent Tales From Vienna series with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra stopped short in the 1930s. But the tradition, says Kovacic, is alive in Vienna. "There's a lot of new music in this field. There's a very strong Viennese song life, Wienerlied, which is sung at the Heurigen [wine taverns\], in Gasthäuser [guest houses\], in pubs, but also in concert halls. They mix it up with pop and rock, with all different kinds. There are very, very interesting compositions written now. For instance, there's an ensemble called Extremschrammeln - a small group with strings, accordion and guitar - fantastic music, but it simply fuses new music with these old traditions. It's a totally new style. It's a very lively scene.
"For instance, a man called \ Neuwirth, he's the leader of this Extrem band: he wrote 300 songs and dances in Viennese style. He's the most famous. But the thing is, it's German texts, and you can't really translate them. You wouldn't find new compositions in this style on the orchestral level. It's more small-scale groups."
Beyond the traditions of 19th-century Vienna, and the Second Viennese School of the early 20th century, the Viennese new music of the second half of the 20th century is not at all widely known. As Kovacic is venturing in to this area I ask about the wider picture.
From the older generation he lists Gottfried von Einem ("a very elegant composer"), who died in 1996, and Friedrich Cerha ("a key figure of the European avant-garde" at the end of the 1950s), who, now in his late 70s, is still best known abroad for having completed Alban Berg's opera Lulu.
From the next generation he names H. K. Gruber, who turned 60 last year, "a crossover personality who opened people's minds in Austria to the fact that it's possible to write in the traditional sense harmonically", according to Kovacic. "Although his harmonies are very complex they're still within the concept of traditional harmony. And he includes bossa nova and all the richness of 20th-century rhythms which came to Europe from elsewhere.
"He's very, very much a follower of Schoenberg in the economy of his writing. Every note is on the right spot. He does not write a note which is not covered by an idea. It has to be there, there is a purposeful existence for each note.He's very, very strict in these things. He develops his compositions according to a formal plan and design. It's highly intellectual music, but for the audience it's more emotional, actually."
There's also Kurt Schwertsik (born 1935), who features in the Irish Chamber Orchestra concerts. "I chose Schwertsik, for he knows the Viennese idiom very well, and his piece actually consists of dances, partly in Viennese style, Valse-musette, polka, gavotte. It's dance music, and it uses the Viennese element, but lightly, a touch of it. He's one of the composers who kept contact with the past. He knows so much about these old composers: Mahler, Brahms and Strauss. He's such a good craftsman.
"Although in some pieces he was very avant-gardistic at the beginning of his career, his music is always built in the old sense of craftsmanship. I chose him so that you can have a waltz of the 20th century from Vienna together with a waltz by Strauss."
The youngest composer he mentions, Olga Neuwirth (born 1968), hasn't been heard in Ireland yet. Her name appeared on an advance announcement for a Crash Ensemble concert last year, but her work disappeared in a programme change. It might not be particularly obvious at first, he says, but there is a distinctive Viennese tradition to be traced in Neuwirth's work. He points to the grotesque world of the writer H. C. Artmann and names another writer, Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando, and the painter Albert Paris Gütersloh, as points of reference.
"If you take these people, only three of many possible names, then you would certainly find that she is in the tradition of Viennese expression." But then, he adds, wryly, "I think I'd have to say I don't have the feeling that people in Vienna have the need to be Viennese."
Ernst Kovacic directs the Irish Chamber Orchestra's Viennese programme at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on Saturday and at University Concert Hall in Limerick on Sunday
