Balanescu Quartet at Urania – Budapest

This concert was taking place in relation to a Hungarian movie premiere, that I won’t talk about. Balanescu made the soundtrack and tours now with the movie. This was the firs gig ever with this new composition. Brand new songs, full of intensity and passion as Balanescu presented it in English before. He was so shy and modest on the mike. But him talking was a complete opposition to him playing. First of all, the outfit: a colorful long coat that looked too big and his typical hat. Already a character, his outfit comes as a necessary tool to hide an introverted self I guess, a hysterical identification to hide an absent body. But just for a moment. When he had his violin, everything exploded. He was not playing, he was dancing. He was changing faces, now sad, now laughing with a big mouth, now a small baby, now a huge monster, now growing, now getting small. Balanescu playing the violin is a Misha Katz conducting. And the music for all this process... a true project of corporeal transformation through sound. Balanescu’s spastic body puts up with his quartet a visual attack where sound is becoming the most real mark of his corporeality. It was explicitly materialized for audience in his struggle with his violin. For the spectator it was a tough experience of the entire nervous system. This is what I would call one of the last experiments to actively end the process of representation through sound. A la Merleau Ponty, Balanescu claims through his music “not the possible body which we may legitimately think of as an information machine but that actual body I call mine.” His body on stage expresses through sound first of all exactly this lively concreteness.