The list of works by GyulaBánkövi is heavily weighted towards flute pieces, solos and compositions written for flute quartet. The 5-minute Délaissement (2017) shows influences of the music of Estonian composer Lepo Sumera and Swede Anders Hillborn’s Clarinet Concerto. The ‘Letter aria’ melody from Puccini’s Tosca appears twice in the latter. The Letter aria motif is also evident in the Gyula Bánkövi flute solo, and the work faithfully traces the tremors of Cavaradossi’s soul from the evocation of the happiness of a former love through despair and loneliness to the will to live.
George Crumb’squartet composed in 1970 is one of the most exciting and moving scores of 20th century string quartet music. The Vietnam war, one of the most traumatic periods in American history, can be discerned in the background to the work. It follows a mystical journey of three stations: the fall from grace (Death or departure), spiritual annihilation (Absence), and the return to the light. Numerology plays a key part in the composition: the number 7 is the symbol for God, 13 for the Devil. Musicians frequently count out loud in French, German, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese and Bantu. The music of Black Angels is densely interwoven by references taken from centuries of classical music: the 13th century melody of Dies irae, the sequence of the funeral mass, the tritone as interval of the Devil, the ‘Devil’s Trill’ from Tartini’s sonata or the melody of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Crumb enriches the possibilities of string quartet instruments with electronic amplification; the repertoire of techniques includes shouts, whispers, whistles, singing or even clicking of the tongue by the performers, in addition to which they use percussion instruments and even glasses to obtain special effects. The 13 musical images are organized into a totally symmetrical bridge form, with the seventh movement Black Angels at its centre.
Thomas Adès (born: 1971) composed this work for the Clara Haskil Piano Competition in Vevey, Switzerland. The theme of the series comprising five variations is a folk song in Sephardic, Ladino language, Lavaba la blanca niňa. The music of Variations also appears in the Adès opera The Exterminating Angel, which was composed after a film by Luis Buñuel. In an interview, Adès spoke about how accurately the restless world of harmony of the Sephardic folk song expresses insatiable desire and mourning.
The title of the string quartet composed by GyulaBánkövi in2013 refers to Crumb’s Black Angels. Gyula Bánkövi first heard the American composer’s work in 2000, and it opened new perspectives for him. In fact, it was so influential that he composed two works for string quartet and electronics in 2002 and 2008. White Angels contains thematic references to the Crumb score. Here, the composer gives up the use of electronics but he mobilizes the wide arsenal of special string playing methods. Occasionally, he evokes grand orchestral sounds, and he unfolds musical processes extremely rich in effects, in a single-movement form. It is not by chance that he has titled his quartet ‘White’: the music remains on the side of ‘light’ from beginning to end, avoiding hell altogether. Even the tritone as interval of the Devil appears in a playful context. Performers also noticed the qualities of Gyula Bánkövi’s string quartet: currently, this is the composer’s work performed by the greatest number of different ensembles. In Hungary, five quartets have added it to their programmes, but it has also been performed in Beijing.
