Eötvös: Snatches

Album Description

Celebrated as an exceptional conductor of modern music, Péter Éötvös is also a gifted composer and performer who clearly enjoys taking in the musical scene from several vantage points. Snatches, his 2004 release on the Hungarian BMC label, is, as he puts it, his "message in a bottle" to lovers of jazz, though there are no indications that Éötvös is out to sea in this idiom. An avid fan since the 1950s, when he strained to hear western broadcasts over shortwave radio, Éötvös has combined the memories of his early exposure to jazz with avant-garde procedures in his free-form compositions, elements of which may suggest collaged snippets of Varèse, Szöllösy, or Berio, as much as they may evoke hard bop, third stream, or free jazz improvisations. The opening work, Snatches of a conversation (2001) is the most jumbled and chaotic track of the album, as it involves hurried, twitchy fragments of speech from Omar Ebrahim, entwined with Marco Blaauw's throaty, double-bell trumpet solo and nervous, pointillistic accompaniment from the Ensemble für Neue Musik. More "spectral" in its harmonic structures and stunning in orchestration is the free-floating Jet stream (2002), featuring Markus Stockhausen's soaring trumpet riffs above the churning sonorities of the BBC Symphony Orchestra; this seems to be one of the most dynamic cluster scores ever conceived. Paris-Dakar (2000) is a high-speed race for double-bell trombone with harmonizer and jazz orchestra that keeps László Göz blowing ever more strenuously to keep ahead of the energetically chugging band. Last on the disc is a pair of improvisations on melodies from Éötvös' opera Le Balcon, first with Béla Szakcsi on piano, followed by Gábor Gadó on electric guitar. These offer a refreshing change from the bigger, denser pieces, and may appeal more immediately to fans of traditional jazz, but they seem a little ordinary in comparison with Éötvös' more vivid ensemble extravaganzas. BMC's reproduction is terrific in tone color, dynamic range, and resonance, so the performances sound up-close and amazingly realistic.
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