Balázs Horváth (b. 1976) is one of the most exciting figures of the younger generation of Hungarian composers. A pupil of Jeney and Bozay, a participant of workshops led by Eötvös and by Stockhausen, Horváth is a keen experimenter with a high receptiveness towards novelties. His activity as a conductor and a director of his own group also is impressive.

Horváth started to participate in composition contests while still a student at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in the ‘90s; a decade later he won the ‘In Memoriam György Ligeti’ competition in Berlin with his ensemble piece Poly. He received another important first prize at the 2nd New Hungarian Music Forum in 2011.

A composer marked by strongly intellectual and conceptual features, Horváth is absorbing as many different influences as possible, and he is expressing himself through various channels. Besides being a composer whose works are performed throughout the world - Amsterdam, New York, London, Tokyo - he earned a doctorate from the Liszt Academy with a thesis on the spatial aspects of music; he has been teaching composition and theory there since 2002; he increasingly devotes himself to conducting; he founded the group THReNSeMBle in 2009; and he organizes various musical events such as the joint projects of the Ferenc Liszt Academy and The Juilliard School (NYC) in 2004 and 2007.

Poly was composed for 13 players: six winds, five strings, piano four-hands. It can be regarded as an homage to Ligeti and his music given Ligeti’s influence on Horváth and the title of the competition. Therefore the musical elements used and even the titles of the five movements refer to those artistic, technical, scientific and acoustic creations and phenomena that Ligeti admired.

In Poly what is most remarkable is the extraordinary multiplicity of textures, sounds, and composition methods. Extreme contrasts in pitch, dynamics, and the speed of events are common, but the general impression is that of a strictly organized structure. An interesting—definitely Cage-esque, but at the same time an entirely original idea—is used in the central movement, Poème Canonique (referring to Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique). Here only 12 musicians are playing, each of them following his own metronome while playing his own strictly composed part. The speed of the metronomes is limited to a relatively narrow interval, therefore the “planned” process disintegrates slowly and partially. This generates a unique fluctuation between deterministic and aleatoric principles.

Balázs Horváth Poly 
(1 fl (anche fl picc.), 1 ob, 2 cl in Sib, (2. anche cl basso in Sib), 1 cor in Fa, 1 trb, 1 pf - four hands (two players), 2 vl, 1 vla, 1 vlc, 1 cb (with 5 five strings), 12 Metronoms (Mälzel type or a more recent analogue or digital metronome)

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