Joseph Hallman, Tündérmesék, for solo alto saxophone and piano and chamber orchestra

I have been working on Joseph Hallman’s pieces since year 1999.
We were school mates together at CIM.
Classical musicians gem together all the time, composers, instrumentalists, vocalists (after party followed, you know, we were college kids:)).

In 2008, I had Joe to commission a piece for me for my Carnegie Hall debut before officially moving to Hungary, then briefly I spent a year at the Liszt Academy.

Ever since, whenever I could afford, I try to play Joe’s works here in Hungary.

Joe has become an important memory of my life, his music is unique and always has his own language which can be as crazy as some Russian “pianistic” works or easy as Bjork influenced spiritual feel. More importantly, Joe is easy to work with, and cares for the performers’ needs and keeps his music accessible.
Don’t take me wrong, his musical language still speaks through clearly, it is Joseph Hallman.

Joe is an orphan, he works his way up. He’s still working hard with 2 professor jobs at universities in Philadelphia. Not to mention he has been a Grammy nominee, premiered at BBC, records by top labels… so on.

I asked Joe to write a piece for me, specifically for orchestra, piano and saxophone. And he did it with such professionalism within the time that needed to be done as the timeline David from Papageno in Budapest requested me to submit. Joe specifically asked maybe better to send to every single musician the mp3, so we get a basic rhythmical and harmonic idea how the piece feels like, as for the best result that the performers, conductor, all work as one.

Here is the program notes Joe wrote about the piece, Tundermesek.

Notes about the piece:

This piece was written for Hsin-ni Liu in the Spring and early Summer of . Tündérmesék is a set of fairytales. Each movement creates its own little world in which its fairytale unfolds. Each movement moves through seemingly programmatic episodes. Feel free to imagine your own fairytale to each episode. Whiffs of characters waft through each movement and sometimes crossing between them. These characters are sometimes fleeting and impressionistic. The fairytales are folkloric short stories often involving supernatural elements. Imagine each movement illustrating a character and their interactions in their own discrete fairytale worlds. These fairytales are not always sweet. They are sometimes sardonic, often sarcastic and tinged with darkness in some movements. You can often hear the supernatural elements. Visualize the magic inherent in each movement, the sparkling of witches’ spells, an ogre, an troll, or some other non-human entity. Finally, the work ends with a sweet and peaceful good night, a mother tucking her children in to sleep. This work was written in Spring and early Summer for my dear friend, the pianist Hsin-Ni Liu. It was influenced by Hsin-Ni’s love for her children and a melding of the fairytales they might be reading with her and her tremendous artistry as a pianist. The piece was also influenced by such tales from Hungary as those published by Baroness Orczy, who translated several of the region’s stories for children for “Old Hungarian Fairy Tales”. Thus, the title is Hungarian for “Fairytales”.

scored for:

solo piano

solo alto saxophone

1 flute

1 piccolo

2 clarinets Bb

1st violins (at least 4)

2nd violins (at least 4)

violas (3 or 4)

cellos (3 or 4)

bass (2-4)