One of the most significant contemporary composers of our time, Péter Eötvös, died in April this year. He left behind a vast body of work that included operas, film scores, chamber music and choral pieces. One of his last orchestral compositions was Cziffra Psodia, a piano concerto dedicated to the Hungarian pianist György Cziffra, which we’ll perform on Thursday 28 November at Cadogan Hall with pianist János Balázs and our Principal Associate Conductor Alexander Shelley.
Inspired by the music of Bartók from an early age and tutored under Zoltán Kodály in Budapest, Eötvös was a champion of contemporary music, playing with the Stockhausen Ensemble and associating with the avante-garde Oeldorf Group. He conducted the inaugural performance at Pierre Boulez' IRCAM, the French music and sound research institute, and he held titled conducting positions at the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boulez' Ensemble intercontemporain, and the Budapest Philharmonic and Festival Orchestras at various points in his career.
Read on to discover more music by this extraordinary composer.
1. Multiversum
When Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly into outer space in 1961, a seventeen-year-old Eötvös was inspired to write a piano piece called Kosmos. He would return to the musical ideas in Kosmos for new compositions throughout his life, including Multiversum, which he conducted the premiere of at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie in 2017. Written in three movements (Expansion, Multiversum and Time and Space) for a pipe organ, Hammond organ and orchestra, he aimed to evoke the all-encompassing cosmos and all its colours with a unique spatial environment. The two organs sound from different sides of the hall, with the brass and percussion lining the width of the stage behind the strings on the left and the woodwind on the right.
"I started thinking in terms of music at the theatre... I had the technique to portray dramatic behaviour. This is what I find different from my contemporaries who are essentially thinking in music, while I'm not. I'm thinking in situations, for which I find the soundworld."
2. Harp Concerto
First performed only a few months before the composer's death in April, his Harp Concerto was written for soloist Xavier de Maistre. Eötvös set out to write harp concerto with an unabashed embrace of modern musical developments by making full use of all the textures and timbres the harp could produce, with some of its strings are tuned down by a quarter-tone, creating a greater range of tonal possibilities. The second movement is a homage to Maurice Ravel, paying tribute to his staple of the harp repertoire Introduction and Allegro, and also evoking his use of the unforgettable glissando in pieces such as his Piano Concerto in G. The piece opens and ends with cadenzas from the soloist, with Eötvös instructing them to improvise with "no chords, no melody, no citation."
"Everything dealing with sounds, saying something by the means of sounds, are equal in my eyes. Irrespective of whether it is an opera or operetta, orchestral piece or solo, pop or anything that is sung."
3. Windsequenzen
Windsequenzen (Wind Sequences) first premiered in 1975, with Eötvös revising the piece in 1987 and 2002. He was inspired by the Japanese Zen garden, not only in their tranquillity but in their invitation for the person in the garden to listen to the sounds of the rain, the wind and the rustling of leaves. Written for wind instruments, including four flutes (two of them tuned a quarter-tone lower) and two percussionists, six poetic sequences evoke mountain wind, whirlwind, morning breeze, south wind, north wind and east-west wind, which are bookended by two 'windless' movements. In these movements, the flute is accompanied by unlikely companions, the bass drum and tuba respectively, and a shimmering accordion. In addition, the oboist is asked to imitate the wind using only their mouth.
"At a certain age I discovered how important the diffrent musical substances of different languages are... I handle languages from the point of view of their sound, I consider it very important that prosody should be clear."
4. Three Sisters
Based on Chekhov's play, Three Sisters was the first full-scale opera Eötvös wrote in his career. Premiered in 1998, its libretto was written in German and translated back to Russian. It adapts and restructures the fin-de-siecle play into three main sequences that each focus on the three leads, retelling the narrative from each of their perspectives in turn. The composer wrote of this choice: "the story is a sequence of searches for contact, for relationships – centred not on a particular protagonist or protagonists, but on the formulation of the sensitivity of the emotions, connections and content of human life. The basic problem of each central figure is a question of choice. Each time, they are faced with a choice between two possibilities, and whichever choice they finally make, it inevitably leads to failure." Like many of his operas, the protagonists are women. The main female roles were first written to be sung by countertenors, though not all productions use this voice type, opting for female singers. Two orchestras are deployed, one in the pit and one behind the stage.
"My life's task is just like that of a plant that has to grow, open its petals when it's shining and close them when it's not. The same way, I have my own obligations in life. To be active in what was given to me. That's all."
5. Atlantis
This 1995 work is a wildly imaginative evocation of the mythical drowned city, and a portent of humanity's tendency towards self-destruction. Calling upon a wind orchestra, ten percussionists, three synth players, cimbalom, bass guitar, strings, a boy soprano and baritone soloist, an otherworldly soundscape is conjured through intoxicating harmonies and textures in which the listener can be utterly submerged. In a strange dislocation of space and time, Transylvanian folk music is softly heard at the end of each of the three movements, played on either a violin or cimbalom. Perhaps this would be the composer's choice of what music he would want to remain if only a faint imprint of humanity could be heard in the millennia to come.
"I structure, I map out, I think in prime colours just like [Malevich]."
6. Reading Malevich
This 2018 piece for chamber orchestra is a painting brought to life - more specifically, Kazimir Malevich's Suprematismus No.56, a painter who was instrumental in the early twentieth-century Russian art movement. In considering a work that aims towards absolute abstraction, disregarding any history, ideology, object or external referent, Eötvös emulates how an observer's gaze is drawn across the painting, focusing upon the unique red, yellow, blue and black shapes that sit askew on the lines' paths. Split into two halves, both movements of the piece tease out the possible interpretations of Malevich's painting the viewer may have from horizontal and vertical perspectives.
Tim Lutton/ Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Hear the UK premiere of Eötvös' Cziffra Psodia with pianist János Balázs and our Principal Associate Conductor Alexander Shelley at Cadogan Hall on Thursday 28 November 2024.
This concert is jointly presented with the Cziffra Festival.