Cantilena is dedicated to Thomas Friedli, my former clarinet teacher at the Geneva Conservatory, who passed away a month ago in a fatal hiking accident. It is reminiscent of an imaginary Hungarian lamentation song. Hungarian folk songs often have a bitter and sweet character, even songs accompanying the most dreadful texts, which for me emphasizes the meaning of words and weight of feelings. Cantilenais an improvised lamentation-song that constantly reinvents itself over seven minutes and at the end, tries to recall its original melody…which it cannot remember.
Christa Rakich, organ Balint Karosi, clarinet
Price: 10 USD
Gloria (2009. May 12)
I composed this piece for my choir at FLC for Easter Sunday 2008
The instrumentation includes two trumpets, two oboes strings and timpani.
Life performance with the FLC choir
Price: 10 USD
Veni Creator -Toccata for organ solo (2009. May 12)
I composed this piece for the Dublin International organ Competition in 2002. The comptition called for a free-choice 20th century piece.
Price: 10 USD
Organ Toccata on a Hungarian Folk Song (2009. March 08)
I composed "Altal mennek" in 2001 in Geneva, after an improvisation I played for the graduation ceremony in the conservatory's great hall. It is a nice folk-song based improvisation, at the beginning with a musette imitation. Altal Mennek is a popular tune in Hungary, everybody knows this song.
I composed Est Amor in the summer of 2007 for the wedding of one of my best friends, Szabolcs Brickner. Szabolcs and me played music together in elementary school and sang in high school choir together. Since then Szabolcs became a famous tenor. It was during those years I discovered that Szabolcs had a beautiful voice and encouraged him to start voice lessons with my mother, a voice professor at the Liszt Academy. Back then he laughed at me, mocking the opera singers. Today he is hired as a tenor soloist in the Hungarian State Opera.
For his wedding, my mother and I were to perform Est Amor with Szabolcs’ former accompanist on organ, who at the last minute couldn’t make it. So I instead recorded the organ part on my house organ, to be played on speakers at the ceremony; my mother would sing the soprano part and I would play the clarinet live, as planned. Unfortunately, he preparation of the CD took longer than I thought, and after having been in traffic for four hours, we were ten minutes late for the wedding. Nevertheless, the performance of Est Amor went well. The plan of the organ part on tape worked better than I had thought: the organ turned out to be in very bad shape, and the accompanist, too, was late to the ceremony!
The musical idea of the organ part came first to me when writing this piece; I then had a difficult time finding a text that both fit the occasion, as well as the musical ambiance I wanted to create. After browsing the internet for days, I came across exactly what I was looking for: a beautiful love poem in Latin by medieval English poet John Gower. The text of Est Amoruses fractions of this poem of the same name, which Gower composed to celebrate his own marriage to Agnes Groundolf in 1398.
The musical setting follows the line of Gower’s transcendental poetry— a statement of beauty, eternity of love, and faith in God. Similar to the poem’s structure, the musical setting also has three clearly divided sections, accompanied with a constant organostinato. This accompaniment is the core of the texture; it might as well stand on its own as a small organ piece. The clarinet and voice part are polyphonic melodies that submerge into this constant, homophonic sound.
