On 24 January Vladimír Godár’s Concerto Grosso capped off a day-long celebration of the Slovakian composer’s work at the Moving Music Festival in the Hague, turning the spotlight towards an introspective, spiritual musical voice that is rarely heard in the Netherlands. The performance was led by the Matangi Quartet, with a final movement featuring specially created choreography from De Dutch Don’t Dance Division. The programme also featured Godár’s Piano Trio Talisman and Emmeleia – in both its original version of solo piano and an arrangement of it for string quartet.
The 29-minute work for 12 strings and harpsichord premiered in 1987 with Cappella Istropolitana and Andrew Parrott. Like contemporaneous works from Schnittke and Górecki, it sees Godár rediscovering and reinventing baroque forms and sonorities, though its more anguished sequences and heavily divided strings also recall the work of Shostakovich and Penderecki.
The opening movement is an eerie Adagio sostenuto, with an uneasy, lamenting character, with lacerating trills lashing out violently, before retreating to more subdued, searching music. It is succeeded by a ferocious Presto e molto agitato, which opens with arpeggiated figures from the orchestra intercut with more poised, galant music from the concertante group; the succeeding section features violent interjections over a chugging, percussive melody. The finale – Ground, marked Largo e quieto – is a gently weeping chaconne, with falling figures spreading across the divided strings of the ensemble.
The Concerto Grosso was recorded by Parrott and Cappella Istropolitana in 2009, and has also been taken up by the Slovak Chamber Orchestra and, in 2012, Music Aeterna with Valentin Uryupin – watch their performance here.