Csaba Deák comes from Hungary, where he was born 1932, but he came to Sweden already in 1957, and even studied with the Swedish maestro Hilding Rosenberg.
His works for wind instruments have earned him the most attention, but he has composed many pieces for other settings too.

This CD, however, sticks to the wind compositions, and the collection adds up to a very nice CD.

The first piece presented is “Anémones de Felix”, which through Alban Berg-like expressions arrives at a truly personal Deák-wind-piece. The name Felix alludes at Felix Hauswirth, the president of Internationale Musiktage in Uster, Switzerland. The piece was premiered there in 1994. Anémones, says Deák, hints at the Actiniaria, a sea anemone, with its mouth opening and closing and its tentacles slowly moving in the water, down by the sea floor. “Similarly”, Deák says, “the chords expand in my work, only to close up again, to be succeeded by new expanding chords”.

The “Clarinet Concerto” with its three sections follows next. Deák has a special feeling for the clarinet, which he studied at the Bartók Conservatory in Budapest 1949 – 1955. He also composed it with a certain clarinet soloist in mind; Kjell Fagéus, to whom the concerto is dedicated, and who performs here. The concerto is a pendulum between seriousness and light-heartedness, and moves along with “style and grace” (like Dylan had it in his song “Something There Is About You” on the album “Planet Waves” 1974). The beginning, however, is elegiac, with melody lines inspired by Hungarian folk ballads. The succession of the work is somewhat labyrinthic, and the dynamics increase to utilize the very low as well as the very high registers of the orchestra, but most of the time the clarinet paints swirling signs up ahead, well in front of the orchestra; sometimes with the sounding space all to itself. The large contours are there, in the background, but the impression, none the less, is mosaic.

“Farina Pagus” is a Latin translation of “Mjölby” (Flour village) – a town of the district of Östergötland in Sweden, where the town orchestra for which this piece was written resides. It’s a simple miniature, well suited for an opener or to be hard in intermissions, but it also has high musical qualities quite apart from that. It has a rhythmical force and a colorful tonal appearance that pleases.

“Memento mare” (1995) starts like a psalmistic melody, and it is a serious, sorrowful composition, a requiem in commemoration of all those who lost their lives in the horrible catastrophe that took place in the Baltic Sea in September 1994, when the ship Estonia sank, killing more than eight hundred unsuspecting people in a fall storm. This piece is written for mixed choir and wind orchestra, and the text is indeed from the Catholic mass for the dead, the Requiem. This is a moving, thoughtful piece, that strikes many emotions in all of us who went through this trauma which still affects us till this day, like the catastrophe at Tjernobyl or the murder of Olof Palme – three recent traumas, hard to deal with.

“Symphony for Wind Orchestra” (1995) is the concluding work on this Csaba Deák portrait CD from Nosag Records. The symphony moves in dark colors through a serious and averted mindscape, like the medieval land of the Black Death, and though it is written in a symphonic manner certain groups of instruments break loose now and then on concert-like outings. The usage of percussion and some dancing figures calls for analogies with Karl-Birger Blomdahl.