Index – Culture – Serious world success: Silver Tower won the Carpathian Rhapsody in New York
The winning concert film is not unknown to our readers, as its online premiere before Christmas last year, the Mezzo Television premiere on December 19, 2021, can now be seen and heard on the Index.
The Rhapsody of the Carpathians is a visual and aural meeting of parts of a very diverse musical world, combining classical symphonic, Hungarian and Gypsy folk and world music in a unique way.
The Concerto Budapest and the violin art of Gábor Homoky, led by András Keller, dreamed it all up with two world-famous jazz musicians, violin virtuoso Roby Lakatos and guitarist Ferenc Snétberger. Imre Szabó Stein brought the musical atmosphere of the Carpathian Basin into a widescreen, black-and-white visual world.
The music frontier is working
The director said about the silver trophy he had just won, that it was again a serious success in Hungarian music and film. As he put it, they pushed the boundaries hard. He wanted to bring the black-and-white visual world into a unified cinematic spectacle with characteristic contrast lighting, the “bar” of the jazz era and the smoky Pest espresso of the 1960s – all with long-lasting, calm images, dense cinematic close-ups and cut snippets.
As Imre Szabó Stein put it:
Since we made several different recordings, separate with the wilder cinematic cuts, we managed to create it all in a huge post-production. András Keller took an extremely courageous step into the musical frontier of a big band. I think the crossover genre has taken to a whole new level. I would be happy if we were happy at home that a film recording of music can reach orders of magnitude more people in the world.
The Carpathian Rhapsody was filmed during the third wave of the pandemic, without an audience, in the retro-renaissance hall of the Italian Institute in Budapest. The protagonists left alone from the audience are the musicians themselves, as well as the film and television crew, whose members occasionally show up in flashes of unusual camera settings.
For the first time, Imre Szabó Stein, András Keller and Concerto Budapest are not producing a joint film tin. Two years ago, their two-hour, special concert film won the Winged Golden Lion Award in the Performing Arts category of the Venice TV Festival. The concert film Concerto Budapest and Kremerata Baltica, András Keller, Gidon Kremer and the concert film directed by Imre Szabó Stein also made their debut at MEZZO anno.
12 cameras, a staff of 40, 90 musicians
The Carpathian Rhapsody is interested in 42 countries from all over the world, winning the Silver Award in New York from hundreds of works nominated by the largest television companies.
The direct co-creator of the Carpathian Rhapsody is András Komlós, TV director, Ibolya Tóth, music director, Dávid Géczy, creative producer, Attila Lecza, editor, László Vajda, editor-in-chief, Gergely Lakatos, sound engineer. The executive producers of the film are Imre Szabó Stein and dr. Péter Edvi, producer György Czutor, TV co-producer Gergely Lakatos. The recordings were made with 12 cameras, television and film equipment, and the four-day audio and video recording was attended by a 40-person film crew and 90 musicians.
(Cover photo: Filming of the Carpathian Rhapsody / Photo: András Keller / Imre Stein / Concerto Budapest)