Quotes and Intimacy - Péter Tornyai’s Premieres in December
On December 1, works for a chamber ensemble by Balázs Futó and Péter Tornyai had their premieres at the Budapest Music Center, and on December 16, Asasello-Quartett will premier string quartets by Máté Balogh and Péter Tornyai in Neuss, Germany. All these works were commissioned by the Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen and the Péter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation. Péter Tornyai has been involved in both events, and he also talked about these new works, previous compositions and plans.
Both of your new works are somehow in dialogue with the history of music. The same is true of your Bach orchestration, the 5th Contrapunctus of The Art of Fugue, premiered in Leipzig this summer, which refers not only to Bach but also to Webern’s arrangement of Bach’s Ricercar. Is this kind of relationship to the past a temporary phenomenon or a permanent topic in your art?
This has always been of interest for me, and nowadays concert organizers also seem to like these connections. At Bach it was self-evident from the commission, and when I approached this music analytically, I found that I also have to deal with Webern’s arrangement. Interestingly, together with Máté Balogh and Balazs Horváth, I was invited to do some orchestral arrangements of other pieces of Bach’s cycle next year, and I can soon try other ways in them.