Péter Zombola's creative work and oeuvre consists mainly of large-scale orchestral and vocal pieces. Among his compositions, what stands out is his oratorio trilogy, comprising Requiem, Passió, and Kaddis, with the last one of these still in progress currently, only to form an organic whole with the first two upon completion. His compositional style is best characterized as a combination of minimalism and neo-baroque thinking.
Péter Zombola said that the Composer of the Year award was primarily the result of a combination of coincidences, luck, and hard work.
- By coincidences, I mean that, for example, if the district school system had been abolished in Hungary a year before it actually was, I would not have attended a primary school with a music program and would very likely have ended up studying either law or business. In a narrower sense, my preliminary professional background is perhaps supported by the international awareness and popularity of my works as well as the fact that I am giving more and more master classes both in Europe and the United States. I dare hope that talent could also be part of this mix- he added.
The professor reckons that teaching is just as challenging and means just as much responsibility for him as his call for creating new works.
- Day after day, I reinvent myself and try to provide professional and personal guidance to my students. From year to year, I need to connect with the current age group in a different way because their environment is changing very fast, so teaching is both a huge challenge and a lot of responsibility for me. At the University of Debrecen, I also consider interdisciplinary and inter-faculty exchange and connection to be extremely important, which is why I keep offering an elective course on film music every semester, which is available to students from any faculty to take. Furthermore, teaching composition and instrument knowledge at the Faculty of Music and the Institute of Pop(ular) Music is also very near and dear to my heart- he said.
Professor Zombola also mentioned that it had been Remy Franck, editor-in-chief of Luxembourg’s Pizzicato magazine and chairman of the international jury of Classical Music Awards, who had first informed him of the award. At that point, the UD professor could not even believe he had been chosen, and it took him quite few minutes to digest the news.
The recognition and the award will be officially presented to Péter Zombola on March 18 in Bamberg, Germany, where the audience will get a chance to listen to two movements from his 2015 work Passió performed by the local Bamberg Symphony Orchestra at a monumental awarding ceremony.
Press Center – BZ
Photo credit: Robert Balog