Minority Dances, op. 70

Minority Dances was commissioned by the Wiener Kammerphilharmonie and first played by that orchestra under Claudius Traunfellner in Vienna in 1998. The title is literal: Erőd took dance material from the minority communities of Central Europe — the region he had grown up in and left as a young man — and set it for orchestra without smoothing out its idiom. He was born in Budapest in 1936 to a Jewish family, survived the war in hiding, studied with Ferenc Farkas and Leó Weiner, fled after the 1956 uprising and spent the rest of his life in Austria, where he died in 2019.