For their upcoming Christmas concert, the BDO Chamber Music Workshop is preparing a special programme with the Christmas cycle as the central theme. For the first half of the concert, they have put together a medley of musical works linked to Christmas and the spirit of winter by some of the greatest masters of baroque music. The second half of the concert will feature jazz music, often linked to the festive season as it fits in the Christmas spirit rather well, and also some 20th century music that has the capacity of creating an extraordinary atmosphere. The works of Gershwin, Béla Kovács, Ligeti and Rosenblatt will offer the audience a combination of contemplation, exhilaration and musical bravura.
The guest artist of the evening is Dániel Ali Lugosi, who gained national fame in 2014 as the absolute winner of the Virtuosos. He will play a special orchestrated version of Debussy‘s First Rhapsody and Donato Lovreglio‘s highly virtuosic paraphrase of Traviata Fantasia, with themes from Verdi’s opera, of course.
Thanks to the special instrumental arrangement of the BDO Chamber Music Workshop, each piece is given a new, unique instrumentation that embodies both the traditions of chamber music and the grandiosity of large orchestral sound. “The chamber music workshop is, after all, doing exactly what musicians have been doing for centuries, or rather millennia: performing established music according to their own instrument, possibilities and tastes, their audience, horribile dictu their own interests, sometimes with less valuable outcome than the original, but sometimes with an even better resulting performance. Well, the BDO Chamber Music Workshop is doing their utmost to tip the scales towards the latter. Because almost everything they do is fascinating. Apor Szüts is a virtuoso instrumentalist and a virtuoso pianist, but both the transcriptions and the performance are characterised by such lightness and a sense of naturalness that even the boldest (instrumental) changes do not feel far-fetched, and Szüts’ sparkling piano playing does not intrude into the foreground, it simply feels like a peculiarity of the consonance.” (Revizor – the review portal)
