PÉTER TORNYAI For the Public

PéterTornyai’sFor the Public(2013), an approximately 10-minute composition, was created with the active participation of the public, and each performance depends on the make-up of its given audience. It makes for an excellent musical board game! Everyone should come remembering their date of birth. No more clues! 

CLAUDE VIVIER Lonely Child 

Perhaps only the lives of Gesualdo and Tchaikovsky have exercised the imagination of posterity to the same fervid degree as that of tragically fated Claude Vivier (1948-1983). The difference being that Vivier was not a murderer (or committed suicide), but was a victim. At birth his parents rejected him, he grew up in an orphanage until he was adopted aged three. He searched for his birth mother all his life. His open homosexuality finally led to his death: a 19-year-old trickster killed him in Paris in order to rob him. Given such a biographical background, it comes as no surprise to find that Lonely Child (1980) is Vivier’s most personal work. The lyrics were written by Vivier himself, who not only used the French text but his own made-up language with many overtones of Malay. With an understanding of Vivier’s fate, the lyrics give a deep insight into the mind of the author, in the same way as one gets of Attila József on reading List of Free Ideas. The soprano sings a lullaby but instead of a benevolent mother, magicians and fairies look after the peaceful dreams of the little boy. It is more Tibetan Book of the Dead than lullaby. Vivier was well versed in oriental exotic music culture. The unique discipline of his music lies in the fact that one single part dominates, to which an instrumental ensemble of an unconventional composition plays non-traditional harmonies, but it blends fantastic colours utilizing the experiences of spectral music. On listening to this emotionally charged work, we can share György Ligeti’s opinion: “He was the greatest master in his chosen area, in the field of seduction with the sensuality of complex tones.”

STEVE REICH Pulse – Hungarian première

A critic did not treat the Steve Reich composition dating from 2015 with kid gloves. “For 15 minutes, Reich weaves interpretations of a single theme above a static pulse, hoping to form a tapestry from a nice melody resurfaced with rich harmony. It is, well, pleasant. Pulse feels like the score for a short film about the heroism of an office worker’s rote existence, where a daily merry-go-round of busy work means nothing significant ever happens.” We don’t share this harshness. True, Pulse does not enrich the repertoire of techniques of Reich works known in Hungary from the 1980s on, but it is certainly an exciting score. Even the instrumentalization lends it a remarkable light. The constant pulse of the work written for two flutes, two clarinets, piano, bass guitar and four violin and two viola parts comes from the piano and bass guitar. The flutes and clarinets present attractive, pentatonic-based melodies typical of Reich, which occasionally progress in a quarte parallel and sometimes a four-part canon is revealed in them. Now and then the strings double up the winds, sometimes creating a chordal background for this euphoria. There is no lack of Reich-type ‘key changes’, or rather changes of plane, and the master varies and weaves the fabric of the melody with a sure hand. No drama, no catharsis. Relax and immerse oneself in the euphony!

Zoltán Jeney: Agony – Songs on Poems of György Petri 

ZoltánJeney startedworking with Petri’s poems in 2000, the year he died. Clarinet, cimbalom, violin, viola, bass – the songs of György Petri, who was intimate with the world of small-time pubs and bars, are accompanied by a Gypsy band. The material is not lacking in folk performance mode, for instance, in the song of the old closet communist [Bernstein (Eduárd) requests permission to leave], Jeney asks for the method of play of a gardon from the performer to characterize his hero (not a little inebriated…, but very). In another part, the texture of accompaniment is woven from some sort of instrumentalized monophonic structure, restrained heterophony, the advance and extension of melodic notes. The two lines of Something to Say are heard five times, each time in a different variation. From the broad melody line through the chromatically descending lament to Sprechgesang. The instrumental parts of Young Beckett are apparently illustrative yet in truth they are formed over a strict canon. Sometimes only a fraction of a long poem is put to music, for instance, the punchy last line of So Are You. One or other apt musical genre is evoked, such as the military march introducing the prophecy ‘The age of unwavering fools is come’, or a whispering chanson accompanied by a single double bass and then the plucked strings of a violin, in ‘The body declines…’. But of all, the most beautiful is the artful melody in Jeney style of the last song (To the Death of Lui). Quiet humming..., for consolation. Jeney’s music is far more illustrative and more daringly characterizing than in his earlier songs.

Zoltán Jeney died suddenly on 27 October 2019. We remember him through his Petri songs.