Kaleidoscope - Csilla Csővári, Gábor Csalog, Oskar Varga

26 April 2025.  6:00 pm
Budapest Music Center - Library
1093 Budapest, Mátyás utca 8.

In my seventh song cycle, composed again for Csilla Csővári, I felt it important that the music should take back the reigns from the lyrics (in the previous few cycles that I premiered with Csilla, I had used poems by poets like Weöres and Tandori - using the texts with servile humility.)
Having freed myself from the shackles of the text, I was surprised when composing: instead of the old shackles, I was to be bound by different kind of shackles. So the vocal part of the textless songs of the cycle entitled "Two-tone Songs" uses only two notes - in the first song only f and f#, in the second c and b - and so on. Strangely, I felt freer in the new, self-imposed constraints.
In the accompaniment to my song "The Scent of Sounds" (to a text by S.W.) I had the opposite conflict: the possibility of playing notes with the violin and both of my hands proved insufficient. So I created my own work for four-hands piano - in addition to my own hands, I have two pianists' hands on each side of mine, widening the sound field in the direction of the top and bottom notes. So there will be three of us at the piano.
I don't know the answer to how my songs can be related to Schumann's music - perhaps not at all. Or in any way - since all the good music I have been involved with must have left a trace in me in some way - while the composer tries to tie up the threads of these threads (obviously unsuccessfully).

My singer's inspiration, on the other hand, had a more direct effect on me. After the Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Ives songs she performed, I look forward to Csilla's Schumanns with particular curiosity.
I have played almost all the works of the endless violin-piano repertoire over the decades, with countless violinists.Yet I have never figured out the secret of how today's composer should compose for violin and piano. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the major works today are not written for this instrumental setting? Here the impossibility of the task was the inspiration. If I failed, at least I tried. Oskar Varga was a great help to me in composing the seven-movement work. The work is also dedicated to him. Gábor Csalog

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