エトヴェシュ: 作品集

《会話の断片》は喫茶店などでのフレンドリーな会話、ちょっとした巧妙な会話、皮肉に満ちた会話などを表現し、《パリ=ダカール》は文字通りパリ=ダカール・ラリーの砂漠を駆け抜ける熱気、ほこりなどをビッグ・バンドで表現しています。ハンガリーを代表する現代作曲家エトヴェシュによるジャズ・アルバムともいえる一枚です。
東京エムプラス

Celebrated as an exceptional conductor of modern music, Peter Eotvos 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 Eotvos is out to sea in this idiom. An avid fan since the 1950s, when he strained to hear western broadcasts over shortwave radio, Eotvos 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 Varese, Szollosy, 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 fur 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 Laszlo Goz blowing ever more strenuously to keep ahead of the energetically chugging band. Last on the disc is a pair of improvisations on melodies from Eotvos' opera Le Balcon, first with Bela Szakcsi on piano, followed by Gabor Gado 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 Eotvos' 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.