S.Esztenyi : The Garden's Gate -Works for Two Pianos: Six Studies, Three New Studies, Toccata, etc (6/2007) / Iwona Mironiuk(p), Szabolcs Esztenyi(p)

Szabolcs Esztenyi was born in Hungary but moved to Poland in 1969. The music heard on this disc falls broadly into the category of contemporary Polish music that rejects both serialist systematics and minimalist simplicities. Beyond that it's hard to pigeonhole, and it's original enough in conception and form to attract the general listener. Esztenyi is a performing pianist as well as a composer, and the titles of the works here -- study, toccata, concertino -- indicate a link to traditional genres of piano music. The music does have a strong formal emphasis, but it is in no way neo-classic in flavor. It is atonal but uses tonal foci at the local level; as the conceptually involved but informative liner notes by Bohdan Pociej put it, Esztenyi uses both "centripetal" (tonal) and "centrifugal" (atonal) forces. The most distinctive feature of Esztenyi's career as a pianist is its emphasis on improvisation. He won Poland's national piano improvisation contest, an interesting thing in itself, in 1968. Improvisation is present in these works at several levels, even though they are for two pianos (Esztenyi himself is one of the players) and thus controlled in the aspect of the relationship between the two parts. Some of the music uses graphic notation, with sections of music realized by the players. Other passages evoke improvisation by one piano over a fixed set of gestures in the other, as in Baroque music or jazz. And each piece involves a gradual, imaginative evolution toward a formal goal, such as "gradual transformation of the initial material toward a 'continuum'" in Garden's Gates (1999). That work brings prepared-piano sounds to the foreground, although most of the piano textures are traditional. It is interesting to note that the style of these pieces, which date from between 1973 and 2006, did not fundamentally change over that time span; the later works are perhaps more economical but do not speak a different language. These five works for two pianos embody and unify stylistic opposites in a way that few other contemporary works have managed, and their potential audience should extend beyond those interested in music of Eastern Europe.