Marcell Dargay is well-known in Budapest for his curation of the Transparent Sound New Music Festival, a series of concerts scheduled every January, which present a wide variety of international composers and their innovative approaches to new music. As a freelance composer and pianist who has studied with Tristan Murail, Frederic Rzewski, and Péter Eötvös, his unique musical creations often play with words and references to other composers, adding his personal humor to the scores. clever
A recent review described his tounge-in-cheek approach: “Dargay’s conflation of Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” with present US politics became a hilarious Fanfare for the Confused Common Man, and Richard Strauss’ “Thus spake Zarathustra” shape-shifted into a Hitchcockian version of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining…” In his sound-painting “Visages Visible – Visage Invisible,” a smart phone became a proxy-instrument as it recorded instrumentalists walking around as they played. The recording was added to the live instruments as another complex voice in itself.
With degrees from the Bartók Conservatory and the Liszt Academy, Dargay’s output includes clever arrangements and transcriptions of classic and contemporary scores. His dramatic orchestral score “XXLP – A Tribute Album” (2024) is a brilliant humorous homage to several 21st century composers and their famous film scores and theatre classics. In the same year, his piece, “Book of Job,” was honored with the Artisjus Prize in the category of ‘Classical Music of the Year.’
