Ajtony Csaba conducts the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Canadian SALT Festival Orchestra on a CD with the works of Canadian-Hungarian composer István Anhalt, just published by the Canadian Centrediscs/Naxos. The CD contains …the timber of those times.. (…a theogony…), performed by the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and ensemble piece Four Portraits from Memory, performed by SALT Festival Orchestra.
2019 marks the centenary of Canadian-Hungarian composer István Anhalt, a celebrated 20th-century composer in Canada but little known in Hungary. He was born in Budapest and studied at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music and the Conservatoire National de Musique de Paris. His composition teachers were Zoltán Kodály and Nadia Boulanger. After having survived the Holocaust, Anhalt immigrated to Canada in 1949 and was appointed to the Faculty of Music at McGill University, later heading Music at Queen’s University. After several years of off-season experimentation and compositional work at electronic music studios in Canada and the United States, Anhalt, in 1964, installed an electronic music studio at McGill, the first one in the country, and became its director. After a productive and critically claimed carrier both as professor and composer, he died in 2012, in Kingston, Ontario.
The audio CD is available at the Canadian Music Center, Amazon, and at all bigger online music services (Spotify, iTunes, Naxos, etc.).
