József Karai: Choral Works

I first met József Karai sometime in the 1970s, and when I took over the University Choir of the KISZ Artistic Ensemble in the 1980s, our paths crossed very soon afterwards. He was enthusiastic right from our first meeting, and we soon received his then newly composed work, De profundis, which became one of the most defining pieces in the choir’s history. Karai’s other major work was the Stabat Mater, which also became part of our repertoire. Sometime in the early 1990s we made a recording with the Budapest Academic Choral Society4 in a church in Békásmegyer with excellent acoustics, on which we recorded pieces the composer had selected from his output. I listened to the recording again with great pride. The choir, which had gained vast a cappella experience over the previous decades, delivered a performance of exceptionally high quality, sensitivity and impact.

Shortly after the album’s release, I received a call from an American conductor named Jerry Jordan, who, as I later learnt, was one of the United States’ most prominent choral directors and a university professor. Somehow he had got hold of my phone number, and called to tell me that he had heard our Karai CD on a Malév flight and had been impressed by both the works and the performance. We got in touch, and thanks to this, Karai’s choral works—including De profundis, Alleluia and Stabat Mater—became extremely popular in the USA too. What times those were, when you could even listen to contemporary choral music on a plane! It is undoubtedly thanks to this recording that so many of Karai’s works later reached a wider audience.

As I mentioned in the introduction, Karai wrote many songs for the youth movement; yet these were extremely popular in our childhood primarily because of their superbly crafted composition and their perfectly judged, rousing tone. Let us now hear the piece entitled ‘Song of the Homeland’, composed by József Karai, if only to rehabilitate a little the spirit and mindset of our generation! Even with the worst of intentions, I could not call this bad or substandard music.