“Refined touch, an outstanding sense of form, an excellent sense of melody and harmony – these are the words that come to mind as I listen to Péter Rozsnyói’s new solo cd.

As one of his former teachers, I had the chance to get to know Péter as a musician and a person. It was clear to me even then that he would dedicate his entire life to music. Speaking from the experience of hearing Péter’s performance of classical music, I can say he plays the works of Bach with the same naturalness and insight as his own, often improvised, pieces, and jazz standards.

This is also the case in his extraordinarily expressive and emotionally rich playing on this cd, which has once more reinforced in me the belief that an improvisation is good if it sounds as if it had been composed; a composed piece sounds good if it seems to be the fruit of the present moment.”

Kálmán Oláh


SERENITY PRAYER

At a certain level of maturity most creative artists realise that the journey is the destination. Not all of them, however, are able to get to the level of abstraction of 38-year-old Péter Rozsnyói. He was able to put how he felt about this into words when the recording was finished: every beginning is an end, anything that opens something, also closes something. You can only pray to be able to understand and internalise what cannot change, and to change what needs to be changed. After two trio albums this is the very first solo piano recording that Rozsnyói has released. It is a daringly honest confession of his life to date, flowing in a Bach of consciousness.

The recording clearly consists of three layers, though all of it was recorded in one live session. With tapes rolling, Rozsnyói entered the podium of the Opus Jazz Club, sat down to the piano, and improvised to an especially attentive audience. When I first heard the very start of the recording, the E minor track, I had the impression that the opening notes of the melody somehow sounded vibrato. This is obviously impossible on the piano, as this recording is purely acoustic, using no electronics, no meddling whatsoever, with what has been recorded.

The most important layer of the recording is provided by the poetic quality of these completely improvised pieces, which strive for transcendence. They are composed by Rozsnyói, but not in the capacity of composer, rather in that of the improviser, nevertheless all these tracks can be perceived as if they were masterfully crafted compositions. Little Song, the only original composition by him on the record, to all those who have heard it in the trio version, reveals how Rozsnyói is able to think in terms of forms and in concepts. It may well be that this tune demonstrates how Rozsnyói the poet works with his material. Standards by Porter, Gershwin and Van Heusen, forming the third layer, are able to evoke a light, smiling, unclouded atmosphere and therefore provide the welcome balance to all the sounds uttered with palms pressed together.

There is another composer in play here who is not on the list for copyright. When Rozsnyói imagines the man behind this composer, he thinks of Buddha or Jesus, because in his own words “he brings forth the gospel of supreme love” . Once, when he was cornered to put down in writing what exactly Johann Sebastian Bach meant for him in a concert bulletin, he came up with the phrase: “a perfect synthesis of emotion and intellect that can be the bridge of faith between Man and God.” Of course, anyone searching for other peers of the pianist would probably think, justifiably, of Keith Jarrett, from whom Rozsnyói learnt the ethics of improvisation, or Kálmán Oláh, the Hungarian pianist who won the Monk competition and was Rozsnyói’s former professor at the Academy, whose harmonies and rhythms (often inspired by Bartók) Rozsnyói relates to closely. This deep-reaching musical confession could be realised because he has been searching for the paths to the most honest pianistic expressivity all his life – Rozsnyói’s first ever CD also started with a prayer.

Rozsnyói was born in the Western Hungarian town of Veszprém, and started his musical studies there. He graduated in 2004 as a jazz pianist and teacher at the famous Ferenc Liszt Music Academy, Budapest. Participating in a clinic conducted by the British master pianist Julian Joseph he was singled out for his talent, and has since played in London several times.

He was the Hungarian finalist in the 2006 and 2007 Montreux Jazz Festival piano competitions. Soon afterwards he was awarded the Dezső Lakatos Ablakos scholarship. The internationally subsidized Snétberger Music Talent Center, educating Roma children from poor families, contracted him to teach Bach, improvisation, and what comes with it. His first trio outing was released in 2010 featuring his long-standing working band, György Orbán on bass and András Mohay on drums. His second trio CD (Pain of an Angel), was released by BMC Records. This disc features Zoltán Csörsz on drums, due to Mohay’s death in a tragic accident. Important partners of his include the famous drummer Imre Kőszegi, the inimitable singer Gábor Winand along with his enchanting wife and co-leader Elsa Valle, the instinctively genial János Egri on bass, the multifaceted guitarist Attila Rieger, the composer-bandleader Dávid Lamm (guitar) and many others.

Rozsnyói has reached an outstanding milestone in his career with this recording. He was very much aware of the significance of the moment, when he realised his heart-rate was really up as he stepped onto the podium of the Opus Jazz Club to face both the audience and the recording red light. He had not felt stage fright for decades.

The piece he played first became the last on the CD (after all, each beginning is an end), otherwise the digital image of the concert follows the order of the improvised pieces, which he, nevertheless, had been contemplating for weeks in preparation. The synergy of composition and improvisation has become so strong that the listener can hardly tell them apart. And this provides yet another reason to listen to the whole recording as one piece without interruption, for it is then its depths truly reveal themselves to the listener.

Kornél Zipernovszky