Hungarian Salon Music – Irnberger and Kašpar

There used to be an entire world of music built around the assumption that an evening did not need to mean anything except pleasure — a world of divans and gaslight and half-open windows, where a violinist could slide into a Csárdás and nobody thought to ask if he’d studied Bartók’s ethnomusicological transcriptions. That world is what Thomas Albertus Irnberger and Pavel Kašpar are after here, with Brigitta Simon dropping in for a few numbers like a guest who’s wandered up from the ballroom downstairs. Mostly, they get it right.

Irnberger is a violinist of real pedigree — Vienna-trained, a protégé in spirit if not in fact of the old Franco-Belgian and Central European lineage that runs through Auer and Joachim, both of whom turn up here as composers rather than just historical presences. His tone is silvery rather than plush, which suits this repertoire better than a big Romantic wash would. Salon music dies the moment it’s over-fed. Irnberger understands that these are miniatures, not manifestos, and he treats Lehár’s Ungarische Fantasie — the disc’s most substantial item and its smartest opener — with exactly the right mix of showmanship and restraint. The slides are there, unapologetically, portamento laid on like rouge, but the rhythmic profile stays crisp underneath. You can hear Sarasate looking over Lehár’s shoulder the whole time, and Irnberger knows it.

Kašpar is the ideal partner for this kind of thing: alert, never pushing, always finding the little rubato pockets that keep a Lassú from turning into wallpaper. Their csárdás playing throughout — Hauser’s especially — has the requisite doubleness, that grave promenade in the slow section giving way to a Friss that actually accelerates rather than just gets louder. Too many fiddlers fake the transition. These two don’t.

Simon is the more complicated proposition. The voice itself has real body, real Slavic warmth down low, but the diction throughout — in the Lehár “Lied” and the Csárdás from Gipsy Love, in the aria from Kacsóh’s János Vitéz — is frankly mush. Text sheets aren’t provided (a real omission for repertoire this obscure), and without them I found myself guessing at words I ought to have been able to just hear. There’s also a wobble that thickens under pressure, a vibrato that widens exactly when the music wants precision. She’s better in Kálmán’s “Sylvia” entrance number from The Csárdás Princess, arranged here by Michael Bastian Weiss with some genuine wit — three minutes of operetta sparkle, tossed off with the right kind of vulgar joy.

The two Brahms Hungarian Dances — no. 1 in G minor and the less-trafficked no. 16 in F minor — are a shrewd inclusion, not padding. Brahms’s own debt to this same Gypsy-café idiom, filtered through Reményi and then through Joachim’s editorial hand, gets a kind of vindication by context: suddenly the dances don’t sound like concert-hall warhorses dragged in from elsewhere, they sound like cousins to everything around them. Joachim’s own Romanze, composed when he was barely out of his teens, is pleasant and forgettable in about equal measure — decorous, well-mannered, utterly without the fire he’d later put into the Brahms concerto’s cadenza. Auer’s Deuxième Rêverie fares better: there’s a wistfulness to the outer sections that Irnberger doesn’t oversell, and the more agitated middle section actually goes somewhere.

Hubay’s “Hejre Kati” is dispatched cleanly — maybe too cleanly. This is a piece that wants a little grease under the fingernails, a whiff of the coffeehouse, and Irnberger’s version, for all its technical polish, stays slightly buttoned-up. Tchaikovsky’s Méditation — the first of the op. 42 Souvenir d’un lieu cher pieces — sits oddly among all this Hungarian confectionery, but the finger-position work is genuinely interesting, some unusual choices in the shifts that keep an over-familiar piece from going stale.

Carl Böhm’s La Zingana is pure salon confectionery, gypsy topoi and mazurka rhythm stirred together without much concern for authenticity — and that’s fine, that’s the whole point of this repertoire, it never claimed anthropological accuracy. Bartók and Kodály would come along a generation later and demolish the picturesque fiction these pieces trade in. But demolition wasn’t the assignment here, and a listener who wants only truth and no seduction is in the wrong room entirely.

The engineering, done in the Mozart-Saal in Salzburg, is warm and reasonably present, if a touch resonant in tuttis that don’t exist — this being a duo-plus-guest album, there’s not much to blur, but the room adds a haze around Simon’s top notes that doesn’t help the diction problem.

Is there competition? Not really, not for this specific bouquet — you’d have to assemble it yourself from scattered reissues of Ricci, Heifetz encores, or old Hungarian State recordings of Hubay and Auer miniatures. As a single well-chosen anthology, this disc earns its keep. Buy it for Irnberger and Kašpar, tolerate Simon, and don’t expect anything you’ll still be thinking about tomorrow mor