Product Details
- An MVD Exclusive
- SKU: BMCCD240
- Format: CD
- UPC: 5998309302404
- Street Date: 09/08/17
- PreBook Date: 08/04/17
- Label: BMC Records »
- Genre: Classical
- Run Time: 59:14 mins
- Number of Discs: 1
- Year of Production: 2017
- Box Lot: 30
- Territory: NA,GB,AU
- Language: English
Product Assets
Zoltan Jeney - Wohin?
An album picking from the vast oeuvre of the now 74 years old Hungarian composer giant, Zoltan Jeney.
- List Price: $15.99
- Your Price: $15.99
- In Stock: [{"available":"0"}]
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Renowned Hungarian composer Zoltan Jeney, born in 1943, studied composition with Zoltan Pongracz at the Zoltan Kodaly Music School in Debrecen (1957-1961), with Ferenc Farkas at the Ferenc Liszt Conservatoire in Budapest (1961-1966), and with Goffredo Petrassi at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, on the postgraduate composition course (1967-1968). In 1970 at the instigation of Albert Simon he founded the New Music Studio with Péter Eötvös, Zoltán Kocsis, Laszlo Sary and Laszlo Vidovszky. Between 1972 and 1990 this was the most important forum for progressive music in Hungary. One of the main threads in Jeney's musical thinking is the transcribing of extramusical material (e.g. texts, chess games, meteorological data, telex messages, fractal series) into musical processes. Between 1975 and 1984 he sang in the Schola Hungarica choir conducted by Laszo Dobszay and Janka Szendrei: this encounter with the musical practice of Gregorian plain chant had a decisive effect on his thinking as a composer. His works include orchestral compositions, chamber works, songs, choral works, electronic and computer pieces, compositions written together with other composers, and incidental music for theatre and film. In 2005 he completed his monumental oratorio Funeral Rite, which he had been working on continuously since 1987.
Track Listing
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Press Quotes
Wohin? gives international listeners a valuable insight into the postmodernist Hungarian concert music composer Zoltán Jeney (b.1943), featuring recent works for solo piano, voice, cello and piano, string quartet and orchestra. Jeney has been a major voice in Hungarian concert music circles since the 1960s. In 1970, in collaboration with five other leading Hungarian composers, he cofounded the influential group Budapest New Music Studio, which introduced the aesthetics and music of John Cage and Minimalism at its public concerts. The most provocative work on this album is the title track, Wohin? (German for 'Where?') A five-minute orchestral score featuring a truncated chorus in its last 30 seconds, it's his response to the Allied invasion of Iraq. Jeney offers a withering parody in his postmodern mashup of recognizable bits of Beethoven's Ode to Joy. As the anthem of the European Union proclaiming that 'All people will be brothers,' Jeney couldn't have chosen a better subject with which to convey his deeply ironic view of the war. Pavane (2007) for orchestra, the last and most substantial work here, employs a 128-note melody derived from a fractal series. Its first section recalls Ligeti's Atmosphères with amorphous, shifting orchestral textures and tight heterophony. The second section, characterized by jagged polyphonic lines is brief, succeeded by a much longer final movement featuring a continuous, harmonized melody. The music builds into a kind of halting secular chorale - punctuated by irregular percussive accents - fading out on a quiet yet ultimately unsettled unison.
—Andrew Timar, thewholenote.com
I have to admit to having a bit of a thing for Hungarian music - especially that of less familiar composers (other than Bartók, Kodály)... BMC's presentation is certainly attractive; performances & recording standards throughout are more than acceptable.
—Richard Hanlon, musicweb-international.com