Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A composer whose more advanced compositions were prohibited in Stalinist Hungary.
On the island
Eight records
it's a totally crazy music. … Gesualdo he went really into madness in music.
Robert Tear, Alexander Oliver and Stafford Dean
I am an opera fanatic and Monteverdi is really not only the first but one of the greatest opera composers. But for the eight desert island record, I choose the late madrigales, which are less known, and I think they are also operatic music, very dramatic.
String Quintet in C major, K. 515
Amadeus Quartet with Cecil Aronowitz
Mozart's string quartets are more known than the string quintets, but I think some of the string quintets are absolutely the most beautiful of music. They have a balance and a clarity.
String Quintet in C major, D. 956Favourite
Amadeus Quartet with William Pleeth
If I would go uh, you know, on an island alone and I had to take one piece with me, I think it would be this a string quintet of Schubert, which is it is a mystery. The beginning of the second movement, I think, is one of the deepest, of the most magic and mysterious things.
I think this realization on recording by Claudio Abado and by Teatro La Scala is really dramatically, musically and technically one of my favorite uh operas on record.
Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24
Brahms is not my favourite composer, but I wanted to have in these eight records really a piano recording which is the absolutely you know highest level of piano playing … Rudolf Serkin is, I think, one of the deepest pianists of our time.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Gerald Moore
I think in this piece there is a concentration of emotion. It's the moment where two lovers, you know, they are together but uh it's morning and uh a lady tells no no, go, no, go away because i it's too late and she's very, very anxious.
Hungarian Children's and Women's Chorus, conducted by Miklós Szabó
Bartok has two phases. One is the very barbaric, primitive … and there is another side, like a crystal, very clear, and I think these choruses, very simple pieces, are like water, completely transparent.
In conversation
Presenter asks
5:24Right from the start was it your ambition to compose?
No, no. I wanted to be a scientist and to study physics and mathematics. But when I started to learn piano, I was fourteen, I liked music, and immediately I began to compose. But uh to be a professional composer it came much later.
Presenter asks
5:48What were you teaching [at the academy in Budapest]?
harmony and counterpoint. And I was very happy that I was not a teacher for composition because, you know, for forty-eight it was the communist, the Stalinist regime in Hungary and um composition was regulated after the zdanov rules of socialist realism and I hated this.
Presenter asks
17:27How did you feel about [Stanley Kubrick using your music in 2001]?
I was very astonished. I like his films and he never asked me for music. So many people think I composed this music for the film, which is absolutely not true. And even there was no authorization, nothing. … I and the two publishers, we took a lawyer to deal with Metro Gomme Meyer because they they just took the music without having right to do so.
The keepsakes
The luxury
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch
Maybe a picture from Museum, which I don't own it. So if I would take one thing, I would take from Prado in Madrid, the Hieronymus Bosch picture, Garden of Earthly Delight.
Presenter asks
18:54What was your intention [with the piece for a hundred metronomes]?
Oh, it it ha it has also a serious aspect. It was a study in rhythm. To have this different rhythmical layer, the methanomes as separate instruments, they go absolutely uh you know, regular. But the combination gives a very complex rhythmic pattern. But uh you mentioned a more uh humoristic aspect which was in this pie. You know, it was a time of happenings. I I made this piece in sixty two and uh I liked happenings, but I was o only a little bit ironical against happenings. So it was a happening which ironizes happening. It's a totally automatic concert.
Presenter asks
19:34If only one of your compositions were to survive, which one would you like it to be?
You see, it's always my last piece which I finished. At the moment it's a trio for horn, violin and piano, which for me it's a quite a new, you know, the beginning of the late Liga period.
Presenter asks
23:27Do you think that a no-holes-barred approach is a good way to put an idea across [in Le Grand Macabre]?
When I composed this piece in the mid seventies, it was important for me this idea. I I was very much influenced by pop art, not by pop music, but by the painters, by English and American pop painting, you know, uh putting in the picture or in the art object different objects of real life. And I use the whole story of opera more even all story of music like garbage objects.
“I left Hungary not because uh I couldn't express myself as a composer, because I hated both communist and before the Nazi system.”
“I just listen with my inner ears and I listen to the music. So I I hear the music, I imagine the music as it will sound, the whole piece. But then when I write the score, there comes construction and also intellectual work. The first is really intuitive.”
“I have such an experience as as a refugee and uh different dictatorships like Hitler and Stalin, so it was enough. I don't really imagine to be a Robinson.”