In Haydn’s oeuvre, cyclicality and the progression of the movements, do not yet necessarily entail an organic relationship, as we have grown accustomed to in Romanticism since Beethoven. It is thus an imaginary Haydn symphony – compiled by Gábor Hollerung – that we will hear this evening: although each of its movements comes from a different symphony, it seems as if this is exactly the way Haydn intended to write it. Bizet’s Carmen is one of the most popular works in the opera literature, and the orchestral suites created from it are also audience favourites. Rodion Shchedrin’s arrangement is the most exciting of these. He wrote ballet music from Carmen for his wife, the renowned Maya Plisetskaya. The work is written for unique orchestral forces, awarding a major role to an unusually large group of percussion instruments along with the strings. Also making the arrangement unique is the fact that Shchedrin deals freely with the music of Carmen in terms of both its orchestration and its dramaturgy, relying on the memory of well-known melodies jangling in the listener’s ears to make us think we hear several melodies we recognise from the piece that are not actually played. It will not be a dance company that is featured at this performance, but rather Ferenc Cakó, who will relate a story of his own creation using his astonishing sand animation technique.