EIF 26: Vilde Frang and Friends
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh - 22/08/26
Vilde Frang (violin), Olli Mustonen (piano), Benjamin Eredics (trumpet, kontra, tambura), Salamon Eredics (accordion, shepherd flute, recorder)
In this energising morning concert, Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang and her three experienced musical collaborators presented an attentive Queen’s Hall audience with a wisely curated exploration into the roots of Central European concert music, tracing how field-collected folk idioms directly fuelled the twentieth-century avant-garde.
Joined by Finnish pianist Olli Mustonen, alongside multi-instrumentalists Benjamin and Salamon Eredics of the Hungarian group Söndorgő, the performance dismantled the sanitised, polished boundaries which sometimes get imposed on traditional dances.
Proceedings opened in an evocative, earthbound way with two short 19th-century Balkan folksongs – Rastanak (‘Farewell’) and Elment a madárka – establishing an atmospheric prelude before launching into Béla Bartók’s formidable Violin Sonata No. 1, Sz. 75. Written in 1921 for Jelly d’Arányi, this sonata treats the violin and piano not as harmonious partners, but as two distinct, uncompromising forces. Frang and Mustonen embraced this structural friction with fierce commitment. The notes themselves are only a small part of its challenge.
Mustonen brought a percussive clarity to the keyboard in the outer movements (Allegro appassionato and Allegro), asserting the music’s modernist bite without softening its harmonic and melodic asymmetry. Frang responded with sweeping tonal range, moving from a haunting, whisper-thin line in the central Adagio to razor-sharp, virtuosic fury in the finale. As Alice Walker famously noted, “hard times require furious dancing.”
Following the interval, the programme moved on from Bartók at his most challenging, joyously and naturally dissolving the wall between canonical and living vernacular source material. Excerpts from Bartók’s Gyermekeknek (For Children), Sz. 42 (including the crisp ‘Round Dance’ and ‘Peasant’s Flute’), were played alongside traditional Serbian improvisations like Za Plet and Bartók's Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm. The addition of the Eredics brothers brought an immediate vitality to the stage. The tonal contrast between Salamon’s shepherd flute and recorder against Benjamin’s rhythmic drive on the tambura gave Bartók’s Three Hungarian Folksongs from the Csík District and 27 Two- and Three-part Choruses an earthy, resonant quality.
The concert gathered momentum from dynamic contemporary folk arrangements, including the Eredics brothers’ Valahian Dance and Improvisation, the rapid-fire Drago kolo, and another excerpt from Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins (‘Arabian Dance’). The culmination came with vibrant movements from Bartók’s sonorous Romanian Folk Dances, Sz. 68 (notably the lyrical Buciumeana and the explosive Mărunțel), before concluding with Söndorgő’s quietly expansive From Hungary (Elment a madárka).
The acoustic profile of the Queen’s Hall – a former Georgian church whose wooden balconies accentuate mid-range resonance – worked with Frang’s delicate, scraped harmonics as they pierced through dense piano and folk textures. In the back stalls, some of the pizzicato near the end of the Bartók Sonata No. 1 got somewhat lost, however. The BBC Radio broadcast will pick up that and other details.
Rather than treating folk melodies as merely decorative, Frang and her collaborators demonstrated how raw, syncopated field traditions can both shine in their own right and invigorate modern composition. It was an intellectually cohesive, brilliantly executed, thrilling performance that bypassed fusion clichés in favour of blending genuine musical lineage.
