Hallgató documents a concert in the Grand Hall of Budapest's Liszt Academy, where the guitarist Ferenc Snétberger and the Keller Quartett play together and apart. The programme is one of memory and mourning. Snétberger's own pieces, rooted in his Sinti and Roma background, sit beside Dmitri Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, two songs by John Dowland and Samuel Barber's Adagio. The title is a word with different shades in Hungarian and Romani, close to the idea of listening.
The concert took place in December 2018 and was produced for ECM by Manfred Eicher, with Stefano Amerio and Gergely Lakatos as engineers. The Keller Quartett, described by ECM as Hungary's foremost string quartet, is led by the violinist András Keller, with László Fenyő on cello. The double bassist Gyula Lázár joins them in Snétberger's two larger works, played here in versions for guitar and string quintet.
The concert opens with Snétberger's Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra, subtitled In Memory of My People and written in 1994/95 for the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Holocaust. Its three movements move between lyrical themes, free cadenzas and folk dance, and end in the fast Tánc (Allegro furioso). The quartet alone then plays Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 in C minor of 1960, dedicated to the victims of fascism and war. In the Dowland arrangements by David Warin Solomons, Snétberger takes the lute part, joined by the quartet in I saw my lady weep and by Fenyő alone in Flow, my tears. After Barber's Molto adagio and the solo Your Smile, the evening closes with Rhapsody No. 1, taken from music Snétberger wrote for a film about the Roma and the Holocaust.
In The Guardian (2021) John Lewis called it "a terrific collaboration" that runs "through six centuries of music", from Dowland's lute pieces to Shostakovich and Barber. Writing for Sequenza21, Christian Carey noted that collective mourning and a spirit of resistance are bound up with the guitarist's biography. In BBC Music Magazine Natasha Loges singled out the intimate, close-up sound of the guitar and the chilling mock-waltz of the Shostakovich Allegretto.
CD edition, ECM New Series 2653, first released in February 2021, with liner notes by Wolfgang Sandner.
