The following article is an overview of the career of Hungarian-Swiss pianist, composer, arranger, and music educator Bela Balint. The main source of information is an interview with Mr Balint, conducted by Bas Tukker in October 2024. The article below is subdivided into two main parts; a general career overview (part 3) and a part dedicated to Bela Balint’s Eurovision involvement (part 4).
All material below: © Bas Tukker / 2024
Contents
- Passport
- Short Eurovision record
- Biography
- Eurovision Song Contest
- Other artists about Bela Balint
- Eurovision involvement year by year
- Sources & links
PASSPORT
Born: June 1st, 1950, Budapest (Hungary)
Nationality: Hungarian (1950-1976, 2012-) / Swiss (1976-)
SHORT EUROVISION RECORD
Bela Balint was involved as an arranger in the two entries with which songwriter Atilla Şereftuğ took part in the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of Switzerland; firstly, ‘Pas pour moi’, performed by Daniela Simons (1986), for which Balint wrote the studio arrangement as well as the live orchestration; and, two years later, he was responsible for the orchestration of ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’, with which Céline Dion won the festival final in Dublin. On both occasions, Şereftuğ himself conducted the Eurovision orchestra. Eventually, Balint had the opportunity to lead the festival orchestra himself in 1990 as the musical director of Switzerland’s entry ‘Musik klingt in die Welt hinaus’, performed by Egon Egemann.
BIOGRAPHY
Bela Balint – or Béla Bálint, to give his name spelled properly in Hungarian – was born into a family of musicians in post-war Budapest. “My mother was a ballet dancer and a very proficient pianist, who could play almost all of Chopin’s etudes, while my father was a professional violinist. Unfortunately, their marriage wasn’t a happy one. My parents’ characters proved incompatible. When the Hungarian Revolution was crushed by the Russians in 1956, my father escaped to West Germany, where he built up a new life. Eventually, he became the concertmaster in the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. This left my mother all on her own with three children, of which I was the youngest. She could have been a choreographer or a piano teacher, but there were no opportunities for her in that field, so she had to work in factories instead. Her life was very hard and it’s fair to say that I grew up in pretty poor conditions. The first priority was always to scrape together enough money to feed all the mouths at the table.”
“Fortunately, my mother owned a piano. When I was nine years old, she gave me my first lessons. Earlier on, she had also taught my older brother, but when she discovered that I was more talented, all her energy was spent on me. It wasn’t a matter of choice. She simply told me to go and study. My mother was obviously an excellent role model, given that she was such a wonderful pianist herself. She practised her skills every day. Apart from teaching me the piano, she also gave me a thorough grounding in theoretical subjects like harmony. To her mind, I was destined to be a concert pianist – and, at some point, she sent me to another lady teacher, Elisabeth Bacsák, to prepare me for the music academy.”
“Of course, the education I received was purely classical, but at some point I discovered jazz. I started hanging out with jazz musicians. There were lots of clubs and restaurants in Budapest where those musicians met. Contrary to what you might expect, communist authorities in the 1960s were completely at ease with jazz music – something which hadn’t been the case during the early years after the war, when Rakosi was still in power. By the time I was a teenager, however, this was just a distant memory of the older musicians. I was fascinated listening to the conversations which those guys had with each other. When I compared this new discovery, jazz, to the classical environment in which I had been raised, the conclusion was that there was infinitely more freedom to be had in jazz music, especially bebop. What could be better than to sit down at the piano without knowing what you’re going to play – just to make it up on the spot, inventing the music as you go, being creative?”
“These encounters with jazz musicians meant my personal ambitions changed. Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson became my role models. Listening to their records, I was influenced by their style of play. In fact, I was so fascinated by their music, that I tried to convince Ms Bacsák how great they were, but when I played her a wonderful jazz ballad, she said nothing; she just nodded, that was all. She never asked how I had discovered those chords. Meanwhile, she kept on teaching me to play Schubert and Chopin in exactly the same way as she did herself. I remember thinking, ‘My goodness, how many pianists in the world have those same music notes in front of them without being allowed to give their own interpretation?’ When I played a Chopin etude, interpreting it as a little waltz, my teacher remained unimpressed. Who knows, if he had been alive, perhaps Chopin himself would have thanked me for having felt his music so deeply that it gave me the inspiration to create something new. By this stage, obviously, I was no longer motivated to play the game according to the classical rules.”
Budapest in the 1960s, the backdrop of Bela Balint’s early years
“Of course, the 1960s also was the time when teenager music from England and the United States became very popular, also in Hungary, but I’ve never been interested in pop music. The Beatles never struck a chord with me. Jazz music was a challenge, in a technical sense – something which required practice and hard work. To my mind, there was never a challenge in pop music.”
“As I turned sixteen, my main worry was to find quick jobs here and there to support my mother. Mind you, there were patrols checking on people if they had a job – and if you hadn’t found one within a week or two, you could expect to be punished. I started giving piano lessons and I obtained a licence to work as a freelance pianist in bars and restaurants. Meanwhile, I kept on practising my skills. Even my mother felt I was overdoing it. You couldn’t come into my room, because it was full of paper notes, which I used to write down themes by Bill Evans and my other idols. I simply threw those notes on the floor, so that I could pick them up later.”
“One time, while I was hanging out with older jazz colleagues, they gave me just two chords – and out of those two chords, I created an entire concert, which I then presented to them. At the age of seventeen, I decided to take part in a nationwide competition for jazz musicians… and, even though I was the youngest participant, I won first prize! By then, I had formed a jazz trio; and part of the prize was that we got to perform as the opening act of an international jazz festival which was held in Hungary. I also received an invitation to perform at a festival in Zurich, but communist authorities were unwilling to let me go there. Instead, they sent another group – probably all guys who were members of the Communist Party, which I wasn’t.”
“In the following years, I acquired some sort of notoriety in Hungary with my jazz trio. Another guy who I worked with in those years was Aladár Pege, the best jazz double-bass player in Hungary. He and I performed together in concerts for two or three years. Besides my work on stage, I was also trying my hand at writing some first arrangements for small settings, but nothing serious yet – bear in mind that I was still taking classical piano lessons, so time was tight. Aged 21, I was admitted to the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, but I only stayed for one year. Firstly, the ambition to be a concert pianist was no longer there, but more importantly, the level of education proved a real letdown. The theory which was taught to incoming students was so far below my level, that I decided I had better go home and practise by myself in the style of music that I was interested in.”
“The next step for me was to write music for orchestras. My ambition was to put an orchestra in motion, musically speaking. After having run away from the music academy, I went looking for a private teacher, which I found in András Bágya. He was the best studio arranger in Hungary at the time. This man opened my eyes. By giving me assignments to create countermelodies to a lead melody, Bágya quickly recognised that I was bursting with ideas. He then focused his attention on teaching me about the various groups of instruments and their range. Over time, he found out that my mother wasn’t exactly swimming in money. He once said, ‘To tell you the truth, one chord from you is worth more to me than any amount of money.’ In the end, he didn’t charge me anything at all. This man was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
Bela Balint’s arranging teacher, András Bágya
“Now that I had the theoretical knowledge to put my ideas into practice, I was curious to find out if there were opportunities for me in Studio 11. It was the place where all the radio orchestras recorded their music. The weirdest of them was a big band, not consisting of the usual sixteen or seventeen musicians, but just eleven! None of them were particularly good arrangers, but they still subdivided the arranging work among themselves, determined as they were to give nobody else a chance. While I was hoping to reach a higher level in the music business, that door remained closed to me. Was I to remain a bar pianist all my life? For an aspiring jazz musician and arranger, Hungary wasn’t rife with opportunities. It felt like being stuck in a cocoon. That’s why I set my mind on trying my luck in a different country.”
“After my invitation to come and play in Zurich had been turned down by the communists in 1967, I had stayed in touch with my contacts in Switzerland. That’s how I found out about a jazz club in Zurich. I sent a letter to that club, asking them if they were interested in inviting me to come and play there – and they were! This time around, for some reason, permission was given by Hungarian authorities. So there I was, playing piano in a jazz club in Zurich. That was in 1976. That’s how I came to Switzerland… but it could have been any other country in Western Europe. If I had had connections in Germany, I would probably have gone there.”
“Honestly speaking, I was delighted to get away from Hungary. As we used to say, the only way to get a square metre of freedom under communism was to purchase a Trabant. As I didn’t come back on the day that my travel permit ended, the police knocked on my mother’s door in Budapest – and they kept on doing so day after day. When she wrote to me how much this bothered her, I thought of something cunning. In a letter to her, I wrote that I had met a girl who was one of the best piano artists in Switzerland. ‘She’s the best piano teacher I could have dreamt of. What’s more, we’ve fallen in love and we’ll probably get married. That’s why I’ve decided not to come back to Hungary.’ Not a single word of this was true. When my mother read the letter, she first had a good laugh, and then she showed it to the authorities. Believe it or not, they were satisfied with what they read. They took the letter from her and that was the end of it. She never saw them again.”
“In those first months in Zurich, I focused on mastering the German language. I had already picked up a basic knowledge of German in Hungary, but I really gave it my all in those early days in Switzerland to become more fluent, because I realised it would be hard to fulfil my professional ambitions here without speaking the language well. In those very early stages, I had a major culture shock, when I switched on the TV and saw a Swiss folksy music show. In one of the bands featuring in it, there was a double-bass player who handled his instrument exactly like a baseball player holds a bat. It was obvious this guy didn’t have a clue how to play the bass. It sounded horrible. Incredible really! When I told some friends about it, they couldn’t believe how seriously I took the matter. You have to realise that I was used to the situation in Hungary, in which only professional musicians were given the opportunity to take centre-stage… people who had worked hard to reach a certain level. And here was an amateur grabbing a double-bass from his basement and simply hammering away on it. Later on, I learnt that Switzerland has some highly professional symphony orchestras with excellent musicians, but this first impression of mine was of a country in which everyone who felt like playing music on stage was given a free chance to do so.”
Bela Balint was the pianist in Ric Bogart’s short-lived show orchestra, which recorded the album ‘Just Music’ in 1981
“After that first gig in Zurich, the first person to approach me was John Ward. John Ward had been the drummer in Hazy Osterwald’s band for 25 years – a seasoned, highly professional musician. As it happened, he had been on the lookout for a good pianist to form a jazz trio for some time. Someone introduced me to him and he offered me the opportunity to do an audition. Because he was satisfied with what he heard, he hired me and finally formed his trio, with Vali Mayer on bass. John took care of the management job himself and he succeeded in landing us quite a lot of work. I must have stayed with John for the best part of a decade. We played across Switzerland, but also in jazz clubs in Germany – notably in Munich. One time, we were invited to perform at the Montreux Jazz Festival, which was a highlight.”
“Getting to know John Ward was one of the key moments in my career. At that point, I knew practically nobody in Switzerland – and he was a high-profile guy. He knew a lot of musicians. Thanks to him, people in the business became aware of me. One time, Jimmy Woode, an American bass player who lived in Berne, came to a jazz club to listen to the John Ward Trio. After the gig, he asked me if I would be interested in forming a trio with him as well. Of course, I said yes on the spot! During his time in America, Jimmy had worked with so many of the great names in the business. I stayed with him for some years as well, which went on in parallel with the John Ward Trio. Jimmy didn’t perform as regularly as John, but each time he had an engagement – no matter if it was a cocktail party or a corporate event – he called me.”
“After some years, I got to know my first wife – and when we had our baby daughter, it became more important to make money. Up to that point, I had been quite picky about accepting jobs. My ambition was to play jazz and just that, but it’s hard to live on jazz alone. So I allowed myself to be hired by luxury hotels as a bar pianist. I played in the Ascot and Hilton in Zurich, just to have a fixed salary every month. Regularly, I was just sitting there without a single guest in the lobby, which gave me the opportunity to practise my technique. To me, this hotel work was a well-paid piano training.”
“Meanwhile, I was also writing orchestral arrangements, trying to sell them to big bands in Switzerland and beyond. Because I was extremely ambitious, I wrote scores day and night, hoping that one day they would be picked up by a bandleader. In Zurich, there was a great radio orchestra, the DRS Radio Big Band led by Hans Moeckel. It was my biggest dream to work for them as a pianist and arranger, so I kept on sending arrangements to the radio studio. I was convinced that Herr Moeckel would pick up one of my scores one day – and in fact, he did! He told me, ‘Bela, I don’t care what kind of arrangement you write, I’ll record anything coming from you!’ At that point, the radio orchestra had a hard time finding a contemporary style, and Moeckel felt my arrangements were the exact medicine; fresh, upbeat, but also quite complicated. Although he wasn’t a real jazz man, Moeckel was a fine arranger and an excellent conductor himself – so I was over the moon being complimented by him. In fact, I couldn’t have thought of any better compliment from anyone in Switzerland.”
Hans Moeckel conducting the DRS Radio Big Band, c. 1982
“From that moment on, I became a freelance player with the DRS Radio Big Band. Whenever their regular pianist wasn’t available, I was his replacement. This situation lasted for about two years – and then came the day I had been waiting for. Moeckel came to me and asked me, ‘Would you like to join us as our regular pianist and staff arranger?’ It was my dream come true. However, it was not to be… Very shortly afterwards, Hans Moeckel passed away. He was replaced by his longtime deputy, Peter Jacques, who was a pianist like me. I had never become close with Jacques. Others told me he was a bit jealous of me – and he chose someone else as his pianist. Shortly afterwards, the big band was disbanded by Swiss radio (in 1986, three years after the death of Hans Moeckel – BT). I’m quite sure this wouldn’t have happened if Hans Moeckel had still been around. Character-wise, he was quite tough. Many radio employees were quite intimidated by him, but I think this was how he had managed to protect the position of the big band for so long. After Moeckel passed away, the orchestra had lost its champion – and radio authorities were happy to get rid of it as soon as he was gone.”
“Through my connection with Moeckel, I had a foot in the door with the German-Swiss broadcasting service. Some of their producers knew I could write arrangements for them. One was for the famous American baritone Simon Estes. He was invited to perform an aria from Verdi’s Macbeth on television with a Swiss presenter, Veronica Scali. It was a typical idea for the Swiss to allow a fantastic vocalist like Simon Estes to share the stage with a complete amateur. Scali was a bad singer. All the same, it was quite an interesting job for me to write an arrangement to a classical aria.”
“My ambition to work with radio orchestras never faded. Some years after my involuntary departure from the DRS Radio Big Band, I sent another one of my arrangements, a jazzy adaptation of a classical piece by Béla Bartók which I called ‘An Evening In The Village’, to the Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt. It was an ambitious piece of music written for big band with a large string section. I enjoyed myself immensely writing it. I had worked on it just for fun, but when it was ready, I couldn’t wait to have it recorded. That’s why I drove to Frankfurt to introduce myself to the HR Big Band’s manager. As he liked the piece, he had it recorded by the band with string players from the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra – an extremely professional production which I’m rather proud of. Subsequently, this manager stayed in touch with me, with him commissioning me to write part of the repertoire for the HR Big Band. He would regularly ring me, passing me the titles which he wanted new arrangements to. This connection with Frankfurt lasted for some years.”
“One night in 1983, I was playing in a jazz bar in Zurich, when I was approached by a man who introduced himself as André Bauer. He was the musical director of the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. He told me he had just signed a deal as a producer with Japanese air carrier JAL. They wanted an album with a pianist and a large orchestra in the style of Richard Clayderman, but done on a higher artistic level. JAL had already picked a young pianist and composer from Sweden (Robert Wells – BT) to be the face of the project, but Bauer told me he would prefer to have me on board. He then assigned me to take the compositions from that Swedish pianist and rework them in a way which made them more refined, more interesting to listen to. Because it would take me a lot of time to write and practise, Bauer asked me to join him in Vienna to be the pianist in his theatre orchestra for the Austrian staging of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats. After six months of hard work, we travelled to Munich, where I recorded the piano pieces accompanied by the Munich Philharmonic.”
Bela Balint (third from right) with the Pepe Lienhard Orchestra (c. 1986)
“The next step would have been a Japanese tour, with concerts accompanied by large orchestras in eight cities across the country. By that time, however, the relationship between Bauer and myself had soured. He had promised to credit me as co-composer, but in the end my name was only put on the cover of the album (‘Midnight Cruise’, eventually released in 1985 – BT) as the pianist performing the pieces. As it turned out, the Swedish pianist had started a court case against Bauer, which meant the whole project fell into the water. The whole episode was a bitter pill, because I had invested a lot of time in practising those pieces – and Bauer had promised to pay me 50,000 Swiss francs per concert. In the end, I was only paid for the recording session and that was it.”
“While I was still associated with André Bauer, he shared with me his plans for another project; a large orchestra conducted by him accompanying the show band of Pepe Lienhard. He told me he wanted me to write the orchestrations. Just at that time, I happened to meet Pepe Lienhard when we were both sitting as guests in a piano bar. We had a chat about André Bauer. Of course, nothing came of these Bauer plans either, but some weeks later, Pepe gave me a call, offering to take me on a tour of twelve concerts. It was a tour with just the band and no solo singer up front. Up to that point, his band had just featured one keyboard player, George Walther, but Pepe now wanted an additional musician who just played the grand piano instead of an electronic instrument. After that concert tour, Pepe said, ‘I want you to stay with us’. It was a done deal, I was the pianist in the Pepe Lienhard Band for the next five years.”
“When I joined the band, Pepe asked me about my classical credentials. I explained him that I was a jazz musician first and foremost, but that I would certainly be able to play Chopin’s piano pieces or Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. ‘Oh wow, the Liszt Rhapsody, it would be great if you could write a version of it for our show,’ Pepe said. ‘Couldn’t you rewrite the accompaniment in a pop fashion?’ It took me a couple of months to complete the arrangement, but the result was really good. The piece was premiered in a posh music club in Zurich, with Udo Jürgens sitting in the first row. The performance was met with a thunderous applause. After the show, Udo Jürgens joined the band in the dressing room. ‘Where is that lunatic pianist?’ One of the guys pointed at me. Udo then walked up to me, gave me a rather disgusting kiss on my forehead and said, ‘You’re stark raving mad – this version is pure genius!’ He then offered to let me arrange his next concert tour. You have to know that Pepe and his band were Udo’s fixed backing orchestra in live concerts. The band arrangements had always been taken care of by George Walther. If I had accepted, I’m sure the cooperation in the Pepe Lienhard Orchestra would have suffered – and I didn’t want to risk that.”
“So my job in the band accompanying Udo on his tours was just playing the piano. Udo usually started playing the piano part of his songs himself, but he then stood up and walked to the front of the stage to face the audience after the fifth chord – and then it was my job to play the main piano part instead of him. During those five years with the Pepe Lienhard Band, I backed up Udo in some 300 live concerts. Of course, his music wasn’t my music, but I got my satisfaction out of the fact that I was playing with a highly professional band, accompanying a soloist who was used to working with only the best German studio musicians – so he expected us to play our parts flawlessly. That was the main thing for all of us. It gave us a sense of pride walking off that stage after another successful show, in which we had given our absolute best.”
Conducting a string group in a recording session, c. 1990
“As I worked with Udo Jürgens so closely for such prolonged periods of time, it struck me that it had become hard for him to stay humble after all those decades of stardom. In every conversation with him, it was clear that he was a self-centred person, keen to speak about himself and hardly ever about others… and this explained why he was essentially a lonely man. On the other hand, it may have been part and parcel of being a superstar. To stay in the limelight for such a long time, you have to be focused on yourself all the time, I guess. For that reason, in general terms, I wouldn’t want to judge him or his character badly.”
“Accompanying solo artists was the speciality of Pepe Lienhard and his band. Apart from our involvement with Udo Jürgens, the orchestra had its own television show in Switzerland, in which we backed up international guest stars, who had been invited to the programme – singers like Nana Mouscouri and Tina Turner. Another artist was the German singer and actress Ute Lemper, with whom we later also did a concert tour in Germany in 1989.”
“This tour was also the end of the line for me as a member of the Pepe Lienhard Band. I was extremely ambitious at the time, always looking for new challenges and opportunities. Frankly, I had hoped to be the pianist accompanying Ute on stage, with her crawling on the grand piano in the way Marlène Dietrich used to do; the rest of the band was to remain invisible to the audience, hidden behind a curtain. Pepe, however, didn’t raise my name when Ute Lemper’s manager was on the lookout for a pianist – and he then chose a guy he knew from Stuttgart. I was livid. It was a lengthy tour of 80 concerts. I stayed on for the tour, but I isolated myself from the rest of the band. When Pepe eventually asked me what the matter was, I explained to him that I had hoped to take on the role as main pianist. I felt I deserved more recognition after those five years. Later, others told me Pepe was jealous of me and my abilities as an arranger. Looking back, it was for the better that our ways parted. After all those years with Pepe Lienhard, it was time to focus on other things.”
“In the course of the 1980s, I also worked with other bands as an arranger or replacement pianist, most notably with the orchestra of Hazy Osterwald. At the time, my partner was a businesswoman, who ran a posh restaurant in Zurich. She kept going on about how I should try to further my own career, instead of always backing up others. She felt I should reach out to a broader audience with pop-oriented compositions. The idea didn’t appeal to me at all, but eventually I started composing some instrumental melodies – essentially just to keep her quiet and give her the satisfaction of at least having one album with my face on the cover. I recorded all of those tracks in my home studio with synthesisers, because there was no budget for a large session orchestra. Once the album was ready (released by Deltaphon in 1990 under the title ‘Light Of My Heart’ – BT), she started calling the marketing departments of large firms, but of course she got nowhere. That record never crossed the city boundaries of Zurich! It had been her brainchild more than mine. I’ve never believed in building a solo career.”
Balint’s solo album ‘The Light Of My Heart’ (1990)
“Apart from doing some session work as a studio pianist here and there, I became involved in working for German-Swiss public television company DRS. It started when I got to know an editor working for DRS, Erni Soller. We became friends. He wanted to form an amateur band, initially just for the fun of it, playing at galas and corporate events here and there. It consisted of five musicians and a singer hand-picked by Erni. He wanted me as his pianist and musical director. He knew many people in the world of television and he told many of them about this versatile and hard-working musician called Bela Balint. After some time, people started calling me to write advertisements and jingles for television. The jingle I wrote for the game show Risiko was used for eight consecutive years! Financially speaking, this was very attractive work.”
“The big breakthrough was when Erni became the driving force behind a talent show called Showtalent, which ran for several seasons and was very popular. Everyone aiming at a career as a singer was invited to submit a cassette. Those chosen to be on the show were accompanied by the Erni Soller Band, led by me. I also wrote all the arrangements. The musicians were excellent sight-readers and the scores were rather simple, so we did those performances without rehearsing. This made the TV crew really happy, because we helped them to record their shows rapidly. It was a nice programme to work on. On the back of this show, I did several other TV gigs, including the Swiss Musical Night in 1997. I’m very grateful to Erni because he opened a lot of doors for me. The window of opportunity closed when Erni Soller gave up his job at TV DRS – and with a new generation of television producers taking over, who didn’t know me, I was quickly forgotten about. We continued touring with the Erni Soller Band for some more years, but as we were no longer a feature in television shows, interest in our work gradually dwindled. At some point, Erni decided to call it a day and disband the group.”
“In 1996, I started working as a piano teacher at the ACM, the Academy of Contemporary Music in Zurich. It was an attractive combination to have a fixed job at a music school with the television work as a profitable additional source of income. At the time, the ACM was a huge school with some 700 students. At this school, lessons were taught at a near-professional level. Many students were keen to be taught by me because of my background as a jazz pianist and arranger in the professional entertainment business. Unfortunately, the school went bankrupt in 2001, upon which I decided to found my own private music school, BB Concert Music. In parallel, I accepted a job for one day per week at the music academy in Winterthur, where I worked for some twelve years.”
“The idea to form my own school was given to me by my partner. Her suggestion was a sound one, because teaching is only enjoyable when a student has the same passion and motivation for music as myself – and anyone coming here has the motivation to improve his skills, which wasn’t always the case in Winterthur, where many pupils followed your classes just because these were part of the curriculum. In my own school, I have been teaching jazz piano, harmony, arranging, and orchestration. Most of my students are professionals or semi-professionals keen to extend their skill in the jazz field, for example in piano improvisation. Some others are pupils of the jazz academies in Basle and Lucerne, who come to me to prepare for their exams. Many of the pieces I use as course material are old arrangements which I have written over the years – the fact that I have such a large portfolio comes in very handy now. This also makes it easier to pick course material which is geared to different levels of proficiency.”
On tour with the Classic Cinema Orchestra, c. 2001
“Ever since the second half of the 1990s, teaching has been my main source of income. Besides that work, I have always continued gigging with jazz trios and other ensembles here and there. Shortly after the turn of the century, I also worked with Paul Kuhn for some time. I’ve always been an admirer of his abilities as an arranger and bandleader – and it was fantastic that he continued to perform on concert tours until such an advanced age. I simply wrote him a letter asking if he needed a pianist – and, as it turned out, he was looking for a backup guy who would play the piano in his concerts when he himself stood up to sing or talk to the audience. In those instances when he played the piano himself, I withdrew to the keyboard at the back of the stage. It was a huge honour to work with him – and, as I quickly discovered, he wasn’t just a great musician, but a wonderful and generous character too. My involvement with him lasted for about a year and ranks among the favourite episodes in my career.”
“Session work had never been the main part of my professional life, not even in the 1980s, when recording work was much more profitable than later on, but I have continued to take on arranging commissions now and then. I was the co-arranger of an album by the Brass Band Bürgermusik from Lucerne (‘Perlas Rumantschas’ in 2005 – BT). Brass music certainly isn’t my favourite genre, but I was keen to give it a try – and it turned out really well. Some years later, I was contacted by a Swiss jazz singer, Sylvia Felber, to arrange and conduct an album project for her with a big band of the best studio musicians and string players of the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich – a really ambitious undertaking. She picked twelve jazz standards, for which I created new harmonies and different chords, to give the songs a new character tailor-made for this singer. The icing on the cake was when I heard that Hazy Osterwald had agreed to do the liner notes, in which he wrote some wonderful things about me. In all, it was a great professional project.”
“One ambition, which had been with me from my days as an aspiring jazz musician in Hungary, has accompanied me throughout my life – I want to write music which puts an orchestra in motion. In 2009, I finally found the courage to form my own big band, the Bela Balint Big Band. First, I bought a repertoire of some seventy arrangements from America, which I then adapted to give my projected big band its own distinguishable flavour. The next step was to find a group of musicians. It took quite some time, but one guy knew someone else, who then in turn knew a good player from another town, etcetera.”
“I told everyone of them that I couldn’t give them any guarantees of a fixed income from gigs – and, with hindsight, those were prophetic words, because I had underestimated how difficult it was to be your own manager, especially in Switzerland. Can you imagine? A jazz festival in Basle rejected us, because we were from Zurich – they preferred to have a local band of amateur students instead of us. In spite of those setbacks, the atmosphere in the band always remained good. The spirit during rehearsals was flawless. I couldn’t have asked for more. We did some nice gigs here and there, and these were thoroughly enjoyable. The band soldiered on for six years until I had no other option but to call it a day. Going on would have cost me too much of my own money. Some years later, I had the opportunity to try my hand at big band conducting again in a one-off concert with the Budapest Jazz Orchestra and twelve new arrangements all written by me. The result was quite good – not perfect, because we would have required more than two rehearsals for that.”
Writing an orchestral score on a plane flight
“In 2017, I was approached by a lady called Astrid Wittinghofer, a theatre director, who was preparing a production based on the book ‘Ich denke oft an Piroschka’ by Hugo Hartung. As the action in the story takes place in the Hungarian countryside, she was looking for a Hungarian composer and musical director. For the play, I wrote fourteen completely new pieces of music, all based on Hungarian folk music – a genre which had never much attracted me, but which I had always heard throughout my early years. There were gypsy orchestras playing everywhere in Hungary in those days – in the restaurants, on the train, and in the radio. As it turned out, all of it was still there inside of me. I was thrilled to be given a totally unexpected opportunity to show my skills in this field. The production was staged fifteen times in the Bernhard Theatre, right in the heart of Zurich, with a small band of musicians led by me. It’s a production that I’m really proud of, mainly because of the writing process, which I worked extremely hard on.”
“Around that same time, another unexpected commission came my way. The cantor in Zurich’s synagogue, Hanko Bollag, got in touch with me to tell me that he had in mind to record twelve of his own compositions on an album. He wanted me to write the arrangements, which were all done with a synthesiser, used in such a way that it sounded like a full orchestra. For about a year, we worked on this project extensively. One of the songs on the album even made it into the top ten of the Israeli charts. Shortly after this, Zurich’s rabbi Mendel Rosenfeld called to congratulate me on the job I had done. By way of recognition, I was invited to be the musical director of the Chassidic Music Festival, held in Zurich’s Kongresshaus. The star of the show was the internationally acclaimed Jewish singer Avraham Fried, who had been flown in from New York. This concert was a huge success.”
“When you ask me if I’m satisfied with the career I have had, I would say; 70 percent yes and 30 percent no. I would have liked to achieve more in some fields – as a composer and conductor of film music, for example – but the opportunities to do so simply haven’t been there in Switzerland. I would have had to try my luck in America. Having said that, my biggest regret by far is not becoming the regular pianist in the DRS Big Band. Almost every week, every day, I think back to that one sentence from the mouth of Hans Moeckel, ‘Would you like to join us as our regular pianist and staff arranger?’ It always makes me sad thinking back to this. It was a job which would have fulfilled all my ambitions, the most beautiful job in the world. I would happily have been an employee, writing music and practising my piano skills day after day. Well, apparently, it was not to be.”
“Apart from the DRS Big Band, though, I am not the kind of person to look back that often. I prefer to look forward to new challenges, new jobs – it doesn’t matter if it is with a jazz trio, a big band, or a symphony orchestra. As long as I can work as a musician on a professional level, I am happy. I’ve recently formed a new trio with two intelligent fellow players. We are now in the process of rehearsing our performances. Beautiful jazz ballads in bebop style; music which is right up my alley and without a hint of commerciality. There’s also a project with an American soprano living in Zurich, Mardi Byers, for whom I have picked eleven ballads from the American Songbook. Our plan is to allow ourselves to be hired by a corporate company eager to give its clients an exclusive musical gift. I want to record those arrangements with a symphony orchestra – either the Budapest Symphony Orchestra or the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, with which I have already recorded several pieces as an example for potential customers. It would be thrilling to conduct one of those orchestras for this ambitious project. Another recent idea is to do a concert with the RTV Slovenia Big Band. You see, I’m still full of plans. Let’s wait and see what the future holds in store!”
Conducting the Bela Balint Big Band in a concert with singer Enrico Orlandi (2013)
EUROVISION SONG CONTEST
Before his stint as a conductor in the Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland in 1990, Bela Balint was involved as an arranger in two other festival entries of the Alpine country. In 1986 and 1988, Switzerland took part in Eurovision with the songs ‘Pas pour moi’, performed by Daniela Simons, and ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’, by Céline Dion, which won the festival outright. Both were compositions by Atilla Şereftuğ, a Turkish pianist who had come to live and work Switzerland in the mid-1970s – around the same time when Bela Balint got out of Hungary to settle in Zurich.
“Atilla and I used to be good friends,” Bela Balint recalls. “We knew each other years before there was ever talk of him taking part in the Eurovision Song Contest. Initially, when we had just arrived in Switzerland, we were both in the same situation, doing low-paid jobs here and there. In the following years, I moved away to the jazz circuit, performing with John Ward in Montreux and elsewhere, while Atilla remained in the world of pop, mainly playing the hits of the day in different bands which performed in dance halls across Switzerland. He was a bit jealous of me when I continued studying and developing myself as a musician, for which I was rewarded with work at the DRS Big Band and the Pepe Lienhard Band. Atilla didn’t have the same profound interest in jazz. It wasn’t his ambition to progress in that field. On the other hand, he’s a fantastic composer of pop music. His ideas are good and the chords he comes up with are inventive – and both of his Eurovision songs are proof of that. In that respect, he was a fine musician.”
“Atilla wrote ‘Pas pour moi’ for Daniela Simons, who, at the time, wasn’t his wife yet. After he had composed it, he wanted me to write the arrangement. It was a logical choice; we were friends and he knew that arranging was my passion and speciality. He always showered me with superlatives when speaking about my abilities as a pianist and arranger. I knew that he himself didn’t have a clue about the technicalities of arranging, which was fine – after all, he had other qualities, he was the guy with great songwriting ideas. Atilla came to my place to let me hear what he had composed. He had with him a sheet of music paper with the notes. Atilla was really a bit overexcited and wanted to start telling me where he wanted the strings and so forth, but I just said, ‘Take it easy! Just sit at the piano and play me the song.’”
“While he sat down on the stool, I took an empty piece of paper and started drawing a line, as I closely listened and watched him while he was playing. This was an old arrangers’ trick. When he was playing with a curved back, the line I drew was low. That’s how the song started. Then, when he sat straight to play the chorus, I let this line take an upward curve. While playing, he was shouting things like, ‘Drrrrrrrruh, now here comes the finale!’ Atilla wasn’t used to speaking in musical terms, he just expressed his feelings in a simple, straightforward manner. When he was done, I said, ‘Thank you, that’s how you interpret your composition. The exact notes will come later. No use worrying about C-sharps and F-sharps now. The main thing is that I’ve now seen exactly where you want the song to be soft or loud, upbeat or downbeat.’ Based on this information I then wrote the arrangement.”
Daniela Simons performing ‘Pas pour moi’ on the Eurovision stage in Bergen
“The next step was to record the song in the studio. I was Totalarrangeur for this production, meaning that I did the record version as well as the live version, but I don’t have sharp memories of recording the orchestra in the studio. I just recall that Urs Peter Keller, who was Daniela Simons’ manager, was there with the two of us. He told Atilla, ‘Listen, I have to be off for an hour or so. Could you record the piano part while I’m away?’ Out went Urs Peter, and the sound engineer beckoned Atilla to sit down at the piano. At that point, however, Atilla looked my way and said, ‘Please, Bela, couldn’t you do this instead of me? You’re a much more disciplined pianist that I am.’ Deep down, he knew he wasn’t good enough to be a studio pianist… and so I did it! It wasn’t a problem, I was happy to help out. Admittedly, I’m not sure if this was the piano part of the demo version which was submitted to the selection committee for the Eurovision Song Contest in Switzerland, or the final version recorded in the studio. Daniela herself was an able pianist and it’s possible that she re-recorded the piano lines herself for the version which was released on single.”
“When ‘Pas pour moi’ won the Swiss final, Atilla decided he would conduct the arrangement at the Eurovision Song Contest himself. At the time, I was happy to let him take the honours, also because I never really took an interest in Eurovision. Given that jazz is my passion, it never was my ambition to be in this competition – while Atilla was burning with ambition. He longed for the limelight and there was nothing wrong with that. He paid me for writing the arrangement and that was the job I did for him. Having said that, he took quite a risk by wanting to conduct the Eurovision orchestra himself. When you watch him conducting in Eurovision, it was obvious that he lacked the required skills. I have always been someone keen to educate myself. If I had been in his place, I would have taken some conducting lessons to make sure that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself. Musicians will always take notice when someone lacks the skills and abilities to be up front. Fortunately for him, the orchestra was well rehearsed and didn’t mess up.”
In spite of Atilla Şereftuğ’s less than convincing conducting skills, ‘Pas pour moi’ finished in second place in the 1986 Eurovision Song Contest in Bergen, with only Belgium’s Sandra Kim picking up more points than Daniela Simons. Two years later, Şereftuğ yet again won the Swiss pre-selection and thereby the ticket to represent the Alpine country in the Eurovision Song Contest, this time with his composition ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’ – with lyrics by Nella Martinetti, who had also been his fellow songwriter for ‘Pas pour moi’. Through the mediation of his manager Urs Peter Keller, Şereftuğ had been handed a demo tape of Céline Dion; having taken inspiration from the vocal abilities of the then unknown singer from Canada, he wrote ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’. This time, helped by computer expert Donald Häfliger, Şereftuğ put together a synthetic studio arrangement, which was used for the Swiss pre-selection as well as the single release of the song. Only after Céline Dion had obtained the ticket for the international final in Dublin, was Bela Balint commissioned to write the live orchestration. Still, he had his hand in the studio recording, although not officially.
“When Céline Dion came to Switzerland to record the studio version of the song, I was there during the session,” Balint recalls. “I must have been invited by Urs Peter Keller or Atilla. On the day before that, the three of us were together with Céline and her father (perhaps Céline Dion’s manager René Angélil? – BT), as well as lyricist Nella Martinetti, enjoying a meal in a restaurant, just to get to know each other a bit. Then, during the recording session, I had one little bit of input. At some point, she continued singing in a tone which didn’t fit the following chord of the song. I then gave her the advice to break off the note she was singing a little bit earlier, to avoid conflicting with the chord. She thanked me for it, ‘Thank you, Mr Balint’, and that was just about the only thing I had to do with her personally. Still, I’m quite proud of this small intervention.”
Céline Dion during her winning Eurovision performance in Dublin
“After Céline Dion won the Swiss final, Atilla and Urs Peter formally asked me to turn the studio arrangement into an orchestration. I didn’t strictly need this type of work, because I was the pianist of Pepe Lienhard’s Orchestra. This earned me a handsome income, but I felt honoured and happy to help out Atilla again. Of course, I was paid for the arranging job, but I never gave it a thought what a winning Eurovision arrangement is worth – and so the deal I concluded with Urs Peter and Atilla was a really bad one. I was young and naïve!”
“As it happened, shortly before being asked to write the orchestration, I had attended a seminary about the human brain, given by a psychologist from Germany. During the lecture, she explained that humans only used twenty percent of their brain capacity on average. I was there with my partner, and she urged me to invite this German lady to dinner after the seminary – and so we took her to the restaurant of the Hilton Hotel in Zurich, a really interesting and eloquent woman. I remember one example she gave during the lecture. She told us about a person who had a certain problem, but couldn’t come up with a solution to it. Then this person imagined going to a library, eventually finding a book which described the solution he had been looking for all the time – and then he imagined reading this book, the message of which he then used in real life. This is a really deep way of thinking, which only works if you manage to focus your thoughts intensely. When Atilla passed me the music sheets of ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’, I decided to make an attempt at putting to use the theories of this German psychologist while writing the orchestration.”
“First, I learned the sheet music of the song by heart, or almost by heart. I wanted to be completely immersed into the melody. Then, I imagined walking into a pitch-dark room, with stereo installations to my left and right. The next step was that someone put on the record of ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’, but not arranged by me, but by John Williams. The orchestra was not the Eurovision orchestra, but the New York Philharmonic… and then I tried to listen to what I heard. The purpose of all of this was that I didn’t want to find out what I would write, but what John Williams would have made of it. I wanted to feel excited about going to listen to an orchestration written by one my favourite arrangers. How would he write the intro, what would he do in the chorus – and perhaps even more importantly, in the runup to the chorus and straight after it? Then John Williams walked onto the stage and started conducting the song. Do you know which idea this brain experiment gave me? It told me that the song shouldn’t start quietly, carefully building up to the chorus. It showed me that it should start on a high, then going downward later to make way for Céline’s voice absolutely belting it out in the chorus. So rather than looking at the notes in the sheet music in a technical way, I thought of the musical atmosphere required for the various parts of the song.”
“That’s how I wrote the orchestration – and I couldn’t believe it when Céline Dion won the contest in Dublin. Looking back, this song allowed her to really showcase her vocal talent. Mind you, ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’ isn’t a simple song for a singer. Not anyone could have performed it so effectively, with such vocal power, reaching the hearts of those watching at home. So Atilla wrote an excellent song, but it took an artist like Céline Dion to perform it. At the time, she wasn’t the seasoned performer she became in later years. Her voice was still a bit immature. On the other hand, it was clear this was a singer with a huge natural talent and with immense potential. I couldn’t say that I saw a future world star in her at the time, but I did admire the power of her voice and the talent which she obviously possessed. It was nice to see that she found her way to a world audience later on, because she fully deserved it.”
Céline Dion, flanked by songwriters Nella Martinetti and Atilla Şereftuğ, with the Eurovision trophy
“Looking back, I can only be partly satisfied about this experience. At the time, I didn’t care much about Eurovision, but looking back Atilla should have had the gratitude to let me conduct the orchestra for his Eurovision songs. He obviously wasn’t an arranger or conductor, while sharing the platform with songs which finished in second and first place could have helped me in gaining a reputation as an orchestrator. It would be an exaggeration to say that my arrangement to ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’ is a masterpiece. I wrote much better, much more interesting things. In spite of the unusual method I used to write it, it was essentially a piece of craftsmanship – in a way an architect knows how to design houses. After all, that’s what he does for a living. In terms of using acquired skills, writing an orchestration is similar to this. So I did a job, but it was a letdown to notice that Atilla never really acknowledged me for my share in the success. The fact that I knew how to write orchestrations and he didn’t surely played a part in this. Sadly, our friendship didn’t last, but perhaps this was an inevitability, given how both of our careers had been developing.”
Another two years later, in 1990, Bela Balint finally ended up conducting the festival orchestra himself, accompanying Swiss Eurovision participant Egon Egemann with ‘Musik klingt in die Welt hinaus’. Hailing from Graz in Austria, Egon Egemann – stage name of Egon Lackner – was educated as a classical violinist, later joining a Schlager group and turning to producing pop music. In Switzerland, ubiquitous artists’ manager Urs Peter Keller gave him the advice to try his hand at combining playing the violin with singing. His first attempt won him the Swiss pre-selection of the contest. ‘Musik klingt in die Welt hinaus’ was penned by Egon Egemann himself – although the song was credited to his Swiss wife Cornelia, as only Swiss songwriters were eligible to take part in their country’s Eurovision preliminaries. At the Eurovision final in Zagreb, this song finished eleventh in a field of 22 contestants.
We asked Egon Egemann himself about how he got in touch with Bela Balint for his Eurovision project. “When I submitted the song for the Swiss final, Bela wasn’t involved yet,” Egon recalls. “In my home studio, I had prepared an arrangement with synthetic instruments and my violin. When we won the Swiss pre-selection, we had to start looking for an orchestrator. Now that we had qualified for the international final, there was an opportunity to expand the arrangement, given that we were going to work with a large orchestra. My manager Urs Peter Keller already knew Bela, because he also was the manager of Atilla Şereftuğ. Urs told me that Bela had arranged both of Atilla’s Eurovision songs and that he had done a good job on them. This made him the logical choice as arranger for ‘Musik klingt in die Welt hinaus’.”
“Working from my demo version,” Egon continues, “Bela then adapted the choruses, adding an effective orchestration of strings and some brass. He did an especially good job on the string arrangement. It was his idea to raise the chorus half a tone, which gave the song more power. He did a good job on it, a really good job. We recorded the song in a big studio in Munich, with Bela conducting the extended string ensemble there. We then used the exact same arrangement for the contest in Zagreb. In Munich, we also picked up three backing singers, who came along with us to Yugoslavia.”
Egon Egemann and his wife, Cornelia, celebrating their win in the Swiss Eurovision pre-selection in Lugano
When asked about his involvement with Egon Egemann, Bela Balint has nothing but positive words to say. “Although he didn’t know me personally, Egon gave me complete freedom to adapt the arrangement as I saw fit. He was a studied musician with a diploma from the conservatoire in Graz, but there wasn’t a hint of jealousy in him, as had been the case with Atilla Şereftuğ, who would have preferred to keep everything in his own hand if he had been able to – no, Egon was a very pleasant man. Our relationship was one of mutual respect. Egon was excited to see what I would contribute to the song. He didn’t give me any instructions. It was pretty obvious that the basic idea was to let Egon shine in this new image he had thought out as a performer who could sing as well as play the violin. The main thing was to allow him to shine, not getting in the way of his violin solos. The orchestral arrangement had to give the song just that little bit of extra power.”
“The choice was made to use a pre-recorded track with synthesiser and drums for the performance in Zagreb. I don’t remember it ever being a point of discussion. Urs Peter Keller and I knew that Atilla had worked that way for his two Eurovision songs, with this Halbplayback. The rules allowed the use of such a track, and it simply made life a little easier. It’s impossible to reach the sound quality of a studio track live on stage in a theatre concert. Putting strings and brass in a sound mix is pretty easy, but that is not the case with rhythm instruments. Being an experienced musician himself, Egon also knew this. For such an important performance as the Eurovision Song Contest, it was better not to take unnecessary risks. The studio track we had prepared in Munich was very good, so why not just play it safe?”
“So we took two musicians with us to Zagreb, George Schwarz, the drummer of showband Dorados, and a good friend of mine, Karim La Sala, a keyboard player, who later became a piano teacher like me. They accompanied Egon on stage, but their instruments weren’t plugged in. They were just there to mime the synth and drum parts. Contrary to them, Egon played the violin solos live on the festival stage. He is an excellent violinist and this was no problem for the sound mix.”
“Urs Peter Keller also wanted me to conduct the arrangement in Zagreb. He respected me as an arranger and he had complete confidence in my abilities. Of course, I wasn’t an established conductor. My goal was never was to work on classical works with symphony orchestras. I have always been a jazz musician! Still, I had studied a lot – first immersing myself in arranging and harmony when studying with András Bágya, while I was still living in Budapest. Later, in the 1980s, while I was the pianist in Pepe Lienhard’s orchestra, I took conducting lessons with a Bulgarian maestro living in Switzerland. He gave me assignments, which I worked on diligently and which helped me to improve my technique. I felt that a good big band and orchestral arranger should be able to conduct his own scores properly. I can’t stand amateurism, so when I want to learn something, I turn to professionals who know their subject well. Much later, when I formed my own big band, I decided to go back to this Bulgarian conductor, just to freshen up my knowledge – but mainly just because the subject has always interested me.”
“I remember sitting in the coach taking us from the hotel to the concert hall in Zagreb for the first rehearsal. The Swiss delegation was quite small, some eight to ten people, no more. Sitting among them, I didn’t feel nervous, because I had confidence in my abilities as an arranger and conductor. The overriding emotion was one of pride, because these people around me relied on me to conduct the orchestra for their country. I was happy to be given the responsibility.”
Single release of ‘Musik klingt in die Welt hinaus’
“The Yugoslavian orchestra I got to work with was fantastic. As it turned out, the concertmaster (Tonko Ninić – BT) spoke excellent Hungarian and, thanks to him, my instructions were passed onto the others without any trouble. The main thing to explain to them was that the last chorus had to be played passionately… aggressively, if you like. This was about dynamics, which is something you can’t really put into a score. The first violinist explained this to his colleagues in their own tongue – and they understood perfectly what I was looking for. It was obvious that the musicians were prepared in detail. They already knew the score well and they were completely at ease working with a backing track. Other than those instructions, my role as a conductor was coordinating the volume at which the orchestra played, making sure that they became softer and louder in a coordinated fashion. This requires a bit of musicality and technique from a conductor, although nothing resembling the abilities needed to conduct a performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. After all, Eurovision is about pop music. It was nothing to get nervous about. In all, it was very pleasant working with this orchestra.”
“Other than the orchestra, we were also much impressed by the stage lighting in the concert hall. It was all very modern and in tune with the times, something which we perhaps hadn’t expected when coming to Yugoslavia. As we expressed our admiration about this to members of the organising committee which we met backstage, one of them explained they had rented those facilities from an Italian company. This reflected the good job the local television station had done in organising the festival. They had really tried their best to make a good impression on the delegations from the rest of Europe.”
“We didn’t notice anything strange, anything that could have foretold us that this country was about to descend into a civil war. Then again, we didn’t do that much sightseeing. We were just taken back and forth from the hotel to the auditorium and back. One day, all delegates were invited to a place in the mountains somewhere near Zagreb, which had been one of the locations used for the film Winnetou (officially marketed as Apache Gold, but also known as Winnetou the Warrior, released in 1963 – BT). They had arranged for ten or twelve coaches, which were driven out of Zagreb at breakneck speed, with police squads accompanying us all the way. The buses didn’t have to wait for traffic lights. It was funny being given this VIP treatment, but it was an act of courtesy on the part of the organisers at the same time. Once we had arrived at this location in the mountains, we were treated to a nice barbecued meal.”
“As far as I remember, this was the only bit of leisure we allowed ourselves in between the rehearsals. Other than that, I was always together with the other members of the Swiss delegation, discussing our performance, the lighting, and the organisation. I certainly wouldn’t refer to the week in Zagreb as a paid holiday. To me, this was serious work. I didn’t want to give the impression to the representatives of Swiss television that I was taking it easy. I wanted to be sure of making a professional impression on them. When you’re at work with such a mentality, time flies by very quickly. Even if I had wanted to, there would have been no time to roam around Zagreb.”
“Behind the scenes, we had the opportunity to meet Toto Cutugno, the Italian participant who would go on to win the contest. I remember his song, ‘Insieme’. You have to know that our keyboard player, Karim La Sala, was of Italian descent. Thanks to him, we got to hang out a bit with Toto during breaks and in the theatre restaurant where all the delegates were gathered backstage. It was just small talk, pleasant, but nothing more.”
The Eurovision orchestra in Zagreb – photo taken by a member of the Swiss delegation
“On the day before the contest, the day of the general rehearsal, I was given a call in my hotel room. On the line was one of my fellow conductors. I don’t remember who he was. He asked if I would agree to join the other conductors in filing a protest to the organisation. He explained that the organisation had decided not to introduce the conductor before each song. Now, I had already noticed something earlier that week, when we were taken backstage after one of the rehearsals to take a look at the footage of our performance. Each delegation was given the opportunity in such a meeting with the Yugoslavian director and his assistants to comment on the camerawork and sound mix. Watching those shots, it struck me that there was never a camera on me, but I wasn’t tempted to make a comment about it. After all, it wasn’t up to me to tell the local director what to do.”
“However, when the conductor who called me suggested that we could all go on strike by simply refusing to conduct the orchestra for the general rehearsal, I decided to join. At the rehearsal, we were all together in a room, with one of the conductors asking to be allowed to make a phone call to the director. He then told him on behalf of all of us that we refused to go on stage, because we felt it was our right to be shown to the television audience. That was the checkmate move! No more than five minutes later, one of the script girls showed up, expressing the heartfelt apologies of the director and the entire crew. She promised that we were going to be shown on screen – and that was the end of it. We all rushed out to make sure the general rehearsal could get underway at the scheduled time. The whole matter didn’t take more than fifteen, twenty minutes. I don’t think the Yugoslavians had done it on purpose. It was just a small imperfection, a little mistake. They had simply forgotten that it was customary in the Eurovision Song Contest to show the conductor of each country.”
“On the night of the concert, when the votes were counted, I sat backstage without too many illusions or expectations. I heard quite a lot of songs which were stronger than our entry, although there were also entries which were weaker. The mid-table position which we got was just about what we deserved. Honestly speaking, I already sensed that ‘Musik klingt in die Welt hinaus’ lacked hit potential when I first heard Egon’s demo. Given Egon’s character and realism, he also must have realised this. It was a simple song, not bad, but not nearly as good as the two songs with which Atilla Şereftuğ had taken part. Maybe it’s fair to say that Atilla simply is a more talented songwriter than Egon.”
“Egon is also aware that he isn’t the best singer. Make no mistake, he sings perfectly in tune, nothing wrong with that, but he obviously doesn’t have the qualities of a Frank Sinatra or Andrea Bocelli. He isn’t a performer who takes a song to another level in a way that Daniela Simons and especially Céline Dion could. He’s just an excellent violinist, who knows how to sing. So I have no inhibitions whatsoever to say that our performance in Zagreb wasn’t impressive enough to win the contest. I find it hard to say if Toto Cutugno’s song was the correct winner. Success in pop music is about hit potential, something which is hard to grasp. After all, it’s difficult to tell which songs catch on with large audiences and which ones don’t. I just had a feeling that our entry wasn’t strong enough and I was proved right. Having said that, there was nothing to be ashamed of – and there was no disappointment in our delegation after the contest. Not even Egon was downcast. Our performance had been professional, nobody had made a mistake. We had all done our job as music professionals.”
Egon Egemann rehearsing his performance in Zagreb – photo taken from a Dutch newspaper
Egon Egemann pretty much echoes Bela Balint’s judgment. “I’ve never thought of myself as a good singer. I was very surprised even to win the Swiss final, because there were some strong vocalists taking part in it. Of course, once I had qualified for Eurovision, I had been hoping to land in the first third of the scoreboard, but in the end, I was satisfied. There had been so many Swiss representatives before me who had done much worse in the voting. To me, it was obvious from the start that Toto Cutugno’s song was going to win. Once I had heard it, there was little left to discuss. It was simply a great song, easily the best in the competition. As for Bela, I was lucky to have him on board as my arranger. He did a good job, in Munich as well as in Zagreb. His devotion to the project and his great arrangement certainly helped bring about the result which we got. Even though our cooperation was a one-off, I have nothing but positive memories of working with him.”
The final chapter in Bela Balint’s Eurovision story takes us back to 1992, when he composed the song ‘Es geht uns alle an’, which he submitted to that year’s Swiss festival pre-selection. The song was performed by a young male singer, Daniel Stein, but the ballad failed to catch on and did not come close to winning the competition.
When asked about ‘Es geht uns alle an’, Bela Balint digs deep into his memory. “I must admit I had forgotten about that song! At the time, I was the musical director of a television programme called Showtalent, a talent show for aspiring singers. My combo accompanied all the participants and I wrote all the arrangements. Daniel Stein was the winner of one edition of this show. He was a guy with a beautiful voice, so I thought it would be nice to give it a try with him in Eurovision as well. Now and then I wrote little songs, although not really with an ambition of building a career as a pop composer. Something must have inspired me to write this melody. The words were added by Salvatore Ingrassa, an Italian living in the German part of Switzerland. Salvatore was someone I knew well and he had the reputation of being a good lyricist.”
“Some months later, when the submission deadline for Eurovision was approaching, I gave Daniel a call to tell him about this song I had composed. I invited him over to my place to listen to it. He liked it and then we agreed to submit it for the Swiss final. Unfortunately, Daniel lacked the experience on stage. He was overwhelmed having to perform in this large auditorium and too terrified to move naturally on stage. Because of his nerves, his vocal performance also suffered. He really had a beautiful voice, but there were some false notes in his delivery on the night. Daniel himself knew that he had made a bit of a mess of it. He was a real beginner, a very nice guy. Someone should have worked with him on his performing abilities, but unfortunately his career never got off the ground.”
“My involvement in the Eurovision Song Contest didn’t really change the course of my career. In the early 1990s, I became much in demand as a musical director on Swiss television, but this was because I got to know an influential producer, Erni Soller. It had nothing to do with my Eurovision participations. On the other hand, on a personal level, I’m happy to be able to put those two arrangements for Céline Dion and Daniela Simons on my CV, a first and a second place – and then being given the opportunity to conduct the Eurovision orchestra myself in 1990. Not bad! All of this gives me personal satisfaction, but it doesn’t go much further than that.”
Egon Egemann with Toto Cutugno during a moment of relaxation in between rehearsals in Zagreb
“Unfortunately, in the past decades, the Eurovision Song Contest has followed the trends in popular music in general. At some point, record companies decided they were going to promote just one genre, rap music, doing away with everything else. As an example, when you have a young, promising Italian singer with a beautiful voice singing ballads nowadays, I’m sure that record companies would tell him or his manager that this is a type of music not fitting in with modern times. Companies are no longer interested in good voices. All they are interested in is rap and nothing else. It’s a horror situation. If I had been a record boss, I would have made sure to have a catalogue of a wide range of genres; pop, folk music, ballads, big band, rap, anything – just to offer the public a variety of musical genres. Because audiences have been deprived of this variety for so long now, they have lost their musical orientation. To put it bluntly; people have become used to listening to crap music. It’s all they ever get to hear, simply because anything other than rap has been brushed off the table.”
“Even worse than that is the fact that rap music is put together by DJs, people who are not musicians. They mess around a bit, all using the same computer programme, which generates the same rhythm. No wonder all contemporary popular music sounds alike. All of this also plays a part in why so few young people nowadays are interested in learning to play an instrument. Which youngster chooses to study playing the trombone nowadays? Why would they invest time and energy in such thing, when all their role models in the entertainment industry are people without any form of music education?”
“Television companies also bear a responsibility. They could have focused on producing high-quality music programmes, but, since the turn of the century, they have done away with live music, instead turning to cheap entertainment and inviting talentless artists to perform in their shows. In such a world, orchestras don’t have a place. That’s why the Eurovision Song Contest has become what it is today – a show which is more about weird outfits, novelty acts, and dance routines than about music. In the days when I took part, Eurovision wasn’t perfect, but at least it was still about music, about melody. All that is left now is a cabaret show with monotonous rhythms as background music.”
“I prefer not to watch Eurovision. It’s a programme which has moved away completely from my musical tastes. I usually switch on the television towards the end, just to check which songs have finished in the top three positions – and then I quickly change to another programme. I don’t need more than five minutes to figure out what has happened. It’s sad that something which once started as a music programme has been turned into something which is about everything else, but no longer about music.”
Part of the Swiss contingent backstage in Zagreb – seated, drummer George Schwarz, standing, from left: Egon Egemann, Bela Balint, Urs Peter Keller, and a Yugoslavian translator assigned to the Swiss delegation for the Eurovision week
OTHER ARTISTS ABOUT BELA BALINT
Egon Egemann’s memories of working with Bela Balint have been included in the above.
EUROVISION INVOLVEMENT YEAR BY YEAR
Country – Switzerland
Song title – “Pas pour moi”
Rendition – Daniela Simons
Lyrics – Nella Martinetti
Composition – Atilla Şereftuğ
Studio arrangement – Bela Balint
Live orchestration – Bela Balint
Conductor – Atilla Şereftuğ
Score – 2nd place (140 votes)
Country – Switzerland
Song title – “Ne partez pas sans moi”
Rendition – Céline Dion
Lyrics – Nella Martinetti
Composition – Atilla Şereftuğ
Studio arrangement – Donald W. Richards (Donald Häfliger) / Atilla Şereftuğ
Live orchestration – Bela Balint
Conductor – Atilla Şereftuğ
Score – 1st place (137 votes)
Country – Switzerland
Song title – “Musik klingt in die Welt hinaus”
Rendition – Egon Egemann
Lyrics – Cornelia Lackner
Composition – Cornelia Lackner
Studio arrangement – Bela Balint
Live orchestration – Bela Balint
Conductor – Bela Balint
Score – 11th place (51 votes)
SOURCES & LINKS
- Bas Tukker did an interview with Bela Balint, October 2024
- Thanks to Egon Egemann (Egon Lackner) for sharing with us his memories of working with Bela Balint
- A playlist of Bela Balint’s music can be accessed by clicking this YouTube link
- Photos courtesy of Bela Balint, Egon Lackner-Egemann, and Ferry van der Zant
- Thanks to Mark Coupar for proofreading the manuscript
WEBSITES
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