Vienna Opera mourns a prolific composer, 83
mainThe Vienna Opera has announced the death of Iván Eröd, a Hungarian-born composer who worked for several years as house repetiteur.
Losing much of his family at Auschwitz, Eröd fled Budapest in 1956 and struggled at first to make a living. Installed eventually as a professor at Graz, he turned out a stream of string quartets and piano music, much of it enriched by the influences of Bartok and Kodaly.
Chatted with him after the premiere of his Triple Clarinet Concerto in the Musikverein. VPO, Father and two sons – the Ottensamers and Andris Nelsons. Sadly only the Ottensamer sons are still alive. I hope they will, in time, revive the concerto with another soloist. The next performance could be dedicated to the memory of the father and composer.
Iván was one of the most delightful of men as well as being a very fine composer (try the Viola Composer, starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzKhOOYMPnU). I e-mailed him only a week or so ago to discuss a recording of his music, not knowing that he was already in hospital. I’ll post a reminiscence of him in the blog on the Toccata Classics website shortly.
That viola concerto is beautiful.
His son Adrian is an excellent singer and all-round very nice bloke. My thoughts are with him.
Kurier.at 22.6.2019
US-Kulturmedaille für Waltz, Welser-Möst und Rabl-Stadler
Der zweifache Oscar-Preisträger Christoph Waltz, Dirigent Franz Welser-Möst, die Salzburger Festspielpräsidentin Helga Rabl-Stadler und Komponist Ivan Eröd sind am Freitagabend in der Albertina mit Goldmedaillen des US-amerikanischen Kennedy Center ausgezeichnet worden. Für Eröd nahm sein Sohn, der Sänger Adrian Eröd, die Auszeichnung entgegen.
A puffickly normal, tonal, neoclassical music with touches of Hungarian folklore, but different from Bartok and Kodaly, and with a beautiful sense of harmony. It could have been written in the 1st half of the 20th century when tonal styles were still accepted as normal. Shows what has been lost, and that tonality has never been ‘exhausted’ or was ‘irrelevant’. This is a wonderful composer, who would have international status if ‘relevant’ music were not artificially supported by state subsidies and had not destroyed goodwill in the orchestral circuit.
The 2nd Violin Sonata (2000) is well worth a listen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R551E-DFRMg
He was my teacher at the Musikhochschule in Graz for Musikanalyse. A wonderful teacher, a very original composer (I conducted his “Krokodil-Lieder”) and a very kind man.
Dear Maestro Luisi, can you persuade orchestras to program his works (and other under-represented music you particularly like) on your guest-conducting engagements? Without the support of major performing artists like yourself, such music will remain too little-known.