György Orbán 70
Cluj-Napoca, autumn 1989. A 14-yearold scruffy urchin is sitting with his teacher in a music theory class. “Please Miss, I’d like to be a composer! Whatever it takes. I’m moving to Budapest with my family soon. What should I do? Who will teach me?” The elderly lady – Piroska Demény, renowned folk music researcher, music teacher, and one of the finest minds with the broadest cultural learning in Transylvania – replied thus: “Now my boy, there is a former student of mine who lives in Budapest. He is a brilliant composer called György Orbán. Once you have arrived, go and see him. Tell him I sent you and that you want to be a composer. He’ll teach you.”
Dear Gyuri,
Well, four years later, just before the entrance exam to the Liszt Academy, I really did go to see you, just as my music teacher Piroska suggested; but beside the immediate – and, I feel, mutual – affinity there was another by no means insignificant deus ex machina required in order for the elderly lady’s prophesy to come true: Two great minds of the composition department had quarrelled so much over some sonata rondo at the year-end exams that one immediately quit his post as tutor and walked out of the Academy. So, this is exactly the moment you were able to begin teaching composition as a major subject, and because of this I managed to get into your class, alongside Tamás Beischer-Matyó, Dániel Csengery and Tiborc Jobbágy.
Despite the aforementioned affinity and the adored music composition classes, it still took me a long time to realize who exactly my master was (perhaps because, with an excess of modesty, you never presented your own works in these classes). This had to wait until December 1996, when the Miskolc Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Mátyás Antal presented your oratorio Rorate Coeli at the Liszt Academy. It is a breathtaking work of astonishing power, characterized by a most superior handling of the material and indomitable counterpoint skill (your teachers at the conservatory in Cluj-Napoca were Mihály Eisikovits and Sigismund Toduţă), which primarily appear in huge choral tableaux (for example, the 16-part choral canon No. 6); in addition to this there is a French-like lightness around the entire massive work, reminiscent of Honegger. The experience was so transformational that for months afterwards I couldn’t stop listening to the work on a pirate recording obtained through dubious sources. It held me completely spellbound.
I came into contact with your choral works in a similarly profound way only at the end of my studies at the Liszt Academy, when somebody conducted your work Daemon Irrepit Callidus for women’s choir, which had garnered huge acclaim abroad as well, during a choir-conducting diploma exam. I nearly broke into a dance on hearing it. Although in it one can clearly sense its classical roots (Kodály), as well as various contemporary, jazz and film music influences, it all combines to create an inimitable, truly unique alloy, and this is equally true of your other approximately 140 (!) choral pieces: an Orbán choral work can instantly be picked out from a thousand others. As a result of the impact Daemon had on me, I started studying these works, and I rapidly became convinced that in György Orbán (together with Miklós Kocsár) we have the number one innovator of Hungarian choral art and, furthermore, one of the most profound experts and most remarkable formulators of the Hungarian/Central and Eastern European soul. May God bless you in strength, in health and in your continuing creative efforts!
Levente Gyöngyösi