Fermeture-Ouverture, op. 73

Fermeture-Ouverture was written in 1999 on a commission from the Camerata Salzburg, which gave the first performance the same year at the Mozarteum under Roger Norrington. The title plays on the French words for closing and opening, and on the double sense of ouverture as overture — a piece that ends something and begins something at once, written for an ensemble in a season of transition. Erőd, born in Budapest in 1936, left Hungary after 1956, settled in Austria and taught in Graz and Vienna; his music kept a tonal centre through the decades when Darmstadt orthodoxy discouraged it.