Gábor Csalog Sundays – Dialogues with (the) Music / Schumann and Bartók dances

Gábor Csalog Sundays – Dialogues with (the) Music
Schumann and Bartók dances

Featuring:
Gábor Csalog – piano
Gergely Fazekas, musicologist

There is no dance without music, but is there music without dance? The question is, who (or what) dances to the dance music of Bartók and Schumann? Is it our mind? Our soul? Or does the music itself dance? For this concert, Gábor Csalog has selected dance music by two composers whose music was never danced to (at least not written with that purpose in mind), but whose pieces, from the most sensuous and tactile examples to the most stylized movements, show all the layers of the genre. And although both Bartók and Schumann believed that music was a transcendent phenomenon in itself, and very rarely commented on the poetic content of their music, Schumann's dance music evokes many of the figures of his private mythology, while Bartók's dance movements, if properly interpreted, offer a socio-political programme that is still valid today. These questions will also be discussed in the first half of the concert, with music historian Gergely Fazekas as Gábor Csalog's conversation partner.