We already start to uncover a wide range of interpretations and perspectives when we attempt to summarize the life of composer Matyas Seiber, for he is not easy to pin down. Was he a Hungarian composer of the early 20th-century Budapest school? A music entertainer on an ocean liner in the 1920s? Was he the first jazz professor in music history, with a chair in Frankfurt? Or was he more of a British artist- since in London, during and after the war, he also worked as a highly respected choir director and composition professor with an international network of contacts? Matyas Seiber was all of those. His music, especially his chamber music, displays that same great variety, sometimes in crazy, witty mixtures. This album features several works where Seiber shone the musical spotlight on the clarinet or on the human voice. Perhaps half a century had to pass for a new generation of open-minded musicians to unearth and rediscover all the humor, felling and energy that this music still holds in store for us, with its fearless self-assurance and its healthy disregard for limitations of genre or national borders. Many of these pieces are thus recorded here as world premieres. Seiber’s attitude was well ahead of its time and remains up to date, as necessary as ever.
