Fata-Organa

Album review

László Hortobágyi's bizarre Fata-organa (a play on Fata Morgana, a shape-shifting mirage or illusion) is a 16-movement work composed almost entirely of digitally altered sounds of pipe organs. While it purports to be a profound meta-musical experience or a strange tour of the cosmos by way of the composer's esoteric imagination, it is instead a random collage of pompous Romantic organ excerpts, improvised passages, and creepy chanting run through a MIDI processor and presented in an incoherent, mystical miasma. Where all this sound manipulation transports the listener is anyone's guess -- probably nowhere -- but Hortobágyi's own travels can be traced clearly, since he has adapted the sounds of historic instruments by Cavaille-Coll, Silbermann, and others across Europe, and meticulously listed them in his liner notes, should anyone care to check the provenance of a particular stop or timbre. Yet when all their registrations are combined into Hortobágyi's monstrous "virtual organ," the results are not especially startling or novel, but boring and annoying; what should be extraordinary sonorities and amazing colors are really just snippets of organ music mixed together with just the slightest timbral changes and given mysterious titles to make them seem meaningful. This CD is a pretentious hodgepodge, perhaps of interest to fans of the outré, but not worth anyone else's attention.
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