Hungarian Heritage House

Tradition unbound

Up-to-date staging part of Hungarian dance performance

Sacramento Bee,  January 7, 2007.

 

The music and dances are centuries old but the presentation will be 21st century new when the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble performs Friday at the Mondavi Center in Davis. Widely regarded as one of the great folkloric troupes, the 55-year-old Hungarian ensemble is one of the most modern.

"The folk ensemble adds a very new view of the art," said Maria Ferencz, managing director of the Hungarian Heritage House and the folk ensemble, in a recent telephone interview from Romania, where she was traveling with her nephew and his family.

"The ensemble puts this inherited material, which is like the mother tongue to the dancers, on stage in a wonderful new way," she said.

"Unlike the usual folkloric troupes that merely reproduce the old dances, we put these dances on stage with modern theatrical techniques, special lighting effects and video projections."

These projections, Ferencz said, will include scenes of Hungarian villages and landscapes. "The projections make what's happening on stage closer to reality by giving them a sense of place," she said.

This will be the first time the troupe has performed in this manner. "It's a new approach to folklore, traditional yet modern," she said. Ferencz credits Gabor Mihalyi, the new artistic director of the folk ensemble, with the innovation. "He is part of the new generation of European artists," she said. "What he does is completely new in Europe and is a most inventive approach to folk dance."

The Hungarian Heritage House has three divisions, Ferencz said. One is educational and devoted to the country's amateur folk movement, teaching folklore, music, dance and traditional folk crafts; one seeks to preserve the heritage by digitalizing everything on record (music and dance performances particularly) and creating a searchable database that will be available to anyone; and the third is the professional dance ensemble.

The troupe was founded in 1951 with the goal of collecting, performing and preserving the folk dances and traditional costumes of Hungary and the Hungarian-inhabited areas of the Carpathian Basin (which included Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia and other states). In 1918, the region was divided among Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Austria and the former Yugoslavia.

The choreography is based on authentic dances, some of them hundreds of years old and collected in isolated villages. The folk music that accompanies the dances -- the same music that inspired such classical composers as Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály -- is performed live by the combined Hungarian folk and Gypsy orchestras.

Much of the music was collected and preserved by Bartók in the early 1900s. The year 2006 marked the 100th anniversary of the first publication of his arrangements of some of these ancient tunes.

In addition to being a composer and pianist, Bartók (1881-1945) was one of the founders of ethnomusicology, the study and systematic recording of folk music. In 1904 he made his first Hungarian folk song transcription.

In 1905, in collaboration with Kodály (with whom he had become friends when they were students at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest), he made an expedition into the countryside to research old Magyar folk melodies and other songs, the first arrangements of which they published in 1906.

The program at the Mondavi Center will feature the "Hungarian Concerto," a 15-part suite that is subtitled "Homage à Béla Bartók."

The music, Ferencz said, reflects "the old Hungary. It is actually a picture of the whole Carpathian Basin, all the different nationalities, including the Gypsies."

The folk orchestra features such authentic traditional instruments as the cembalo, a stringed instrument like a harpsichord; the bagpipe, "which is not the Scottish kind," Ferencz said; the tarjato, a wind instrument "close to the flute, but with a deeper sound"; and "the hitting gardon, a special instrument with three strings on which the chords are struck. It's a traditional instrument in the Transylvania area," she said.

The Gypsy element of the orchestra is, of course, represented by the violin.

"There is actually a kind of rivalry on stage between the Gypsy violinist and the folk orchestra violinist," Ferencz said. "It culminates in a virtuoso violin duet between these two musicians, who are the leading violinists of Hungary."

Jim Carnes