Program for the concert:
Andrea Szigetvári: Marhakaralábé/Beef Calarabi Cantata
electroacoustic cantata for soprano and electronics
Performed by:
Zsuzsa Zseni – Mezzo-Soprano
Andrea Szigetvári – Electronics

About the The Beef Calarabi Cantata
The inspiration for the piece „Marhakaralábé Kantáta” (Beef Calarabi Cantata) came from a field recording made by Andrea Szigetvári at the Keleti Railway Station in Budapest on the 2nd of September of 2015, when hundreds of refugees were camping out on a metro underpass of Keleti Station. The recording captured a conversation of three Hungarian men, who were expressing their dissatisfaction about helping the refugees by some volunteers. At the most dramatic part of the conversation a man said he wanted to shoot those people, throw them on a truck and burn them, if he had some power. He called the refugees „funnily” marhakaralábé (beef calarabi in English).

To develop the recording and to put its content into a larger context, Andrea Szigetvári collected recordings of interviews with refugees talking about their pitiful experiences and of speeches by different contemporary leaders – like Angela Merkel, Pope Francis, Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump – expressing their ideas about finding solutions for the migration crisis. As a historical context she chose to explore also recordings of speeches made by Mahatma Ghandi and Adolf Hitler.

The segmental parameters or prosody of the vocal material is based on emotional and musical aspects of the speeches, which serve as source material for both the acoustic and the electroacoustic parts of the composition. The melodies, glissandi, rhythms, tempi, structures of silences, accents, volumes and timbral characteristics resulting from the vocal material are embedded in soundscapes reflecting on the location of the recording (the Keleti Train Station) and meanings emerging from the spoken texts.

The Beef Calarabi Cantata was commissioned part of the project Narratives of Memory, Migration and Xenophobia in the European Union and Canada, a project co-led by Dániel Péter Biró, Helga K Hallgrimsdottir, Charlotte Schallié and Helga Thorson and supported by the Jean Monnet Programme of the European Commission. The piece was premiered in Budapest, Hungary and also performed in Victoria, BC Canada as part of this project.  

The concert of Beef Calarabi Cantata will be accompanied by a discussion with composer Andrea Szigetvári and Dániel Péter Biró, Professor of Composition, Grieg Academy.

The course on the 17. October
Andrea Szigetvári will also give a course for Grieg Academy composition students on Monday, October 17, 2022 from 14:30-16:30, John Lunds plass 3, Room 106 (ground floor), University of Bergen.

The visit of Andrea Szigetvári is part of the The Listening Academy, which is generously supported by a research grant by the Faculty of Fine-Arts, Music and Design. Project Leaders: Brandon LaBelle, Professor for New Media, Department of Art and Dániel Péter Biró, Professor for Composition, Grieg Academy.  We are grateful for this support.

Bio
Andrea Szigetvári is an electroacoustic music composer. Her creative and research interests are timbre in new music, interactive performance, audiovisual art and politically involved electroacoustic music theater. She likes to compose every detail of her works leaving space for improvisation and expression as performative interpretations of her ideas. She studied in Warsaw and then as a Fulbright scholar in the USA, later completing her doctorate studies at the Liszt Academy Budapest. Currently she is a reader of Composition Faculty at the Liszt Academy, Budapest leading the Electronic Music Media Art program. In addition to composing and teaching she has organized international new music festivals, conferences and pan-european projects being the founder and leader of Hungarian Computer Music Foundation. Her pieces have been performed throughout Europe and the USA. She won the Prize at the Bourges Electroacoustic Competition in both Sound Art and Multimedia categories in 2001.

Zsuzsa Zseni is a Hungarian mezzo-soprano. She completed her bachelor's degree in classical singing and pedagogy in Szeged, Hungary. In 2009, she won the Special Award for Best Performance in the Franz Lehar International Singing Competition in Komarno, Slovakia. She moved to Norway and started her master's degree at the Grieg Academy in Bergen under Hilde Haraldsen Sveen. She has also completed PMD studies at the University of Stavanger under the supervision of Prof. Bettina Smith. She was a member of the YAGA program in Norway in 2016 under the leadership of Isa Katherina Gericke and Olof Boman, and the same year she was a finalist in the Grand Prize Virtuoso International Music Competition in London. She made her London debut as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro in 2016, and played the role of Mercedes in Carmen in Munich in 2018 directed by Barbara Schoene.She is an active performer in Western Norway, and the public has heard her, among other things, during the Bergen Festival, at the Borealis Festival and the Bergen Kirkeautunnale. Zsuzsa often participates in international projects and has collaborated with, among others, the Icelandic Opera and the Norwegian Embassy in Hungary.From 2018, Zsuzsa has been a permanent member of the Tabula Rasa vocal ensemble, a professional singing ensemble specialized in contemporary music. She is also the singer and musical director of the Bergen-based classical group Bjørgvin Trio. In addition, she is a singing teacher at the Bergen Kulturskole.