“Színek, hangulatok…”

The the two Peter Eötvös pieces to be performed on program of the concert deal directly with the main questions of the festival. Both pieces are inspired by the idioms of jazz or improvised music, and meanwhile belong unquestionably to the unique musical language of their composer characterized by the vivid and varied organic flow of sound. The soloists this evening also represent this kind of unified interpolation of genres and styles. In the practice of Jeroen Berwaerts one can surely find all  genres possible by a brass instrument, while the narrator of the piece “Snatches…”, is András Dés, one of the most well-known percussionists of the Hungarian jazz and world-music scene. Both of the pieces by Otto Respighi are nearly a hundred years old (composed in 1916 and 1924). Their composer is a well-known master of the orchestration of his time, as certainly as Eötvös is a great master of orchestration in our time. Even if there are several aspects in which the two pair of pieces are connected, the real effort to compare these, to explore their correspondences and their effects on eachother waits for the listener, who can create for himself a perfect gateway between our times and those a 100 years before.   

“ Snatches…is as freely composed as an improvisation. A friendly conversation in a coffeehouse, snatches of clever conversation, full of irony… and we trace our way between the tables… The waiter is a double-bell trumpet…

Jet Stream is a painting, horizontal stripes made with brushes of varying thickness (up to several kilometres wide), dangerous yellow – blue – silvery colours, the energy of high altitude winds, the drifting which can be like a Japanese crowd in a one-way street, where only one person (the trumpeter) tries to go in the opposite direction.” (Peter Eötvös)