The Cathedral Choir of St. John the Divine (NYC)

Psalm 84 (Chant: Jacob Gruss)

Year of Composition: 2012
Nick Diodore, Cello and Chester Englander, Cimbalom live in Cleveland, OH
No Exit Ensemble concert, 2019
Commissioned by Andre Emelianoff
Saint Elizabeth Bells is a duet for cello and cimbalom honouring the memory of Sándor András Agócs (1932-2011)
About the piece:
Saint Elizabeth Bells takes its inspiration from bell sounds of the Saint Elizabeth Cathedral in central Budapest. The cathedral is named after Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, a Catholic saint who served the sick. The piece was written in memory of my father, Sándor Agócs (1932-2011). He spent his final days over Easter in Saint Elizabeth Hospital, which stands next to the cathedral. His room faced the cathedral, and through the open windows he would have heard, in semi-consciousness, the tolling bells drifting and resonating. Every phrase of the work’s nine-minute trajectory comes out of the natural intervals of the bell sounds as I mis-remember (and imagine) them, with the purest version—and the part that I composed first—heard near the end. The piece is not mournful, but has a light, evanescent, delicate quality. Inhabiting a meditative space populated with memories just out of reach, the work is a dialogue of colours in which time is suspended. Saint Elizabeth Bells was commissioned by the New York-based cellist André Emelianoff, who encouraged me to explore my Hungarian roots by writing a piece that included the cimbalom, the concert hammered dulcimer, in its scoring. Those roots originate with my father, who came from a family of watermelon farmers—the first of his family to be educated—and who fled the county as a political refugee after the 1956 uprising (he returned to Budapest in the 1990s). The work was premiered by Paul Katz and Nicholas Tolle on the New England Conservatory’s First Monday series in 2013, and is about ten minutes in duration.

-	Kati Agócs

http://www.katiagocs.com

Saint Elizabeth Bells (Violoncello and Cimbalom)

Composer. "Sublime music of fluidity & austere beauty”-Boston Globe “Simmering, and lucid...demands to be heard”-New York Times
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[‘kɑːti] [‘ɑːgotʃ]

Saint Elizabeth Bells (Violoncello and Cimbalom)

Kati Agócs

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