A Kolyokkutya Reszketese

(...) First hearing Szilárd Mezei (a mere boy at the age of 16 knowing well already pieces of Braxton for srtinged instruments too) playing in 1990 in Zenta, I was fascinated by the recognition: a real artist was born overnight before our eyes. This phenomenon was a consolatory answer, - especially for Hungarians -, during the following decade of the Balcan War, but nowadays it is obvious, that God has more to do with us. Mezei-music – inspite of all the tortures and solitude rushing upon it and the idifference being obligatory nowadays – has showed conclusively in its unbraekably unfolding way: it is a phenonemon with absolute values not experimenced in this area before.

What is the difference between the music of Szilárd Mezei and the trends of the other contemporary Hugarian musicians? It is hard to formulate: I think the difference perhaps lies in the particular articulation of music elements variated more extremely as parts and as a whole. Maybe the secret lies in that open behaviour taking upon itself also passion which unfolds and deals the most extreme musical soundings with self-evident bravery. There is an immeasurably stout little fellow seeming fragile balancing mountain-like boulder-stones on his sensitive instument. It takes fifteen years for this unstoppaple viola-liane to dissect and to unify at the same time in its natural way – undertaking the liberty of soul – in order to dissolve all over in the ancient convention of the arrangemenet, of the bed of mother tongue of Hungarina music. At Mezei, on the instrument formed in the European klassical musicality, the tempered tonality lives together in symbiosis with the non-tempered musical world. It is evident for to-day that the smoothing quiverings, rustlings, screams and songs, jinglings and claps, whispering pizzicattoes and creaking of strings, the elementary bursting featureless ligatures, weighty speeches and ethereal singings have been descillated, woven into music. Translated to the language of gift, the steady binding of total openness – that is of endless unselfishness – is the thing, that the centre summing up utmost verges was formed out. An embracing. In Soutland at least, such a spiritual spine unskakeable under any circumstances as we can experience it in Szilárd Mezei is an unexempled phenomenon.

His faithful fellows, István Csík on percussions and Ervin Malina on contrabass, are participients and composers as well of this music mirroring sophisticated sensibility on this first recording. As I mentioned elsewhere, the conceptual palpation, the presentation of the contents of this music emerging from the free waving of Hungarian misicality needs the sure pen of Tamás Váczi; now, on my part, I only want to call attention yet to the fiery-heated tone of Mezei, which preserves the perceptiveness of reserved delicacy at the same time. (...)