FATIMA SZALAY & AMOR FATI (HUNGARY)
FOUR LANGUAGE FOLK SONGS ABOUT LOVE
A singer seen as a fresh voice in Hungarian folk music
A young singer who is increasingly making waves among connoisseurs. Her decision to sing in multiple languages is closely tied to her desire to show how many different peoples have shaped Hungarian folk music — and how naturally diverse cultures have interwoven within it.
“The legacy of Béla Bartók helped me find the words to express these ideas. Even in the darkest periods of history, he focused on the music of the many nations living within Hungary,” she explains.
Like Bartók, she travelled to study the music of Hungarian communities in Romania’s Transylvania region. Upon returning, she began blending that material — in bilingual form — with Turkish, Romanian, Romani, and Croatian folk songs. This fusion is also rooted in her own background: she is half Hungarian and half Afghan.
The album title amor fati is both a wordplay on her own name and the Latin phrase meaning “love of one’s fate” — a sentiment in which she says she feels most at home. Most of the songs are about love, a theme that resonates with the other members of her band as well — fellow students from the Liszt Academy, with whom she has played since the very beginning.
Photo: Schnabel Annabella
