Katica Illényi – The Swan (Saint-Saëns)
2024
6.2K Likes
Best comments
1.“The first notes feel like being cradled in someone's arms and told everything's gonna be OK... after crying for like 3 hours.”
More comments
- 2.“Katica, you are the reason I bought my first theremin two years ago.”
- 3.“Absolutely heaven! That said, my theremin is for sale. Rarely used, mint condition, 100% untouched by human hands.”
The story
The theremin is the instrument you play without touching it. Two antennas, one for pitch and one for volume, and the player pulls notes out of thin air by moving their hands. Katica Illényi came to it from the violin. Born in Budapest in 1968 into a family of string players, she learned violin from her father, who played in the Hungarian State Opera orchestra, went on to the Franz Liszt Academy, and started bringing a theremin on stage in 2014.
The Swan is the 13th movement of Saint-Saëns's The Carnival of the Animals, written for solo cello and two pianos. He thought the rest of the suite too frivolous for public performance while he was alive and let only The Swan out the door. Anna Pavlova and choreographer Michel Fokine turned it into the ballet solo The Dying Swan. Clara Rockmore, the early theremin virtuoso, played it with her sister Nadia Reisenberg at the piano. Those long, smooth lines suit an instrument built for gliding.
Here Illényi plays it with the orchestra of the Hungarian Opera in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, under conductor Szabolcs Kulcsár, recorded in August 2023. A 19th-century cello piece, played on an electronic box from the 1920s, by a violinist waving at the air. And it works.
