On our blog, our contemporary composers present their favorite works from our catalogs. We start here with a text by Dai Fujikura about Peter Eötvös’ work Atlantis.

"For me, it is only Peter Eötvös's music that makes me feel that when I hear it in the concert hall, somehow I can "experience" the world, rather than just listening to the piece of music. My favourite work of his is Atlantis. I knew this work from the CD, which I liked, though I was really surprised when I heard this work for the first time live in the concert hall, in Frankfurt Oper (I think), several years ago.

In the opening of this piece he uses a very interesting combination of boy soprano, cimbalom, electric piano and strings, which join the orchestra and the oceanic sound of electronics so naturally that it seems as if they are all played on one gigantic imaginary instrument. I start to see every sound in 3D, surrounding me, and not just because of huge percussion sets actually surrounding the audience.

Sitting in the audience, I feel like I am floating in a huge bath filled with these magical sounds. I would never want to leave. The music levitates you above the seats you are sitting on in the concert hall. I don't know any other composer’s work that can do that, at least to me.

Also it is, to me, a genre-less piece. It doesn't sound like a typical contemporary music work one would expect in one of those "Neue Musik Tage" sort of festivals, nor music from past. Maybe the reason I feel his music sounds like 3D is not only because of some spatial elements in the piece, but because I remember how he "shapes" music even when he conducts; I felt that when I heard him conduct Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which he told me was his first time conducting that traditional work.

The sounds and also his conducting gestures looked as if he was curving the sound carefully but with passion. So probably this musicality applies also when he composes, but rather than curve someone else's work, he sculpts every sound and every element to make a whole world in which I am happy to float forever."

Dai Fujikura

(Photo Eötvös: Marco Borggreve)