All active participants of the Dohnányi Academy 2025 Masterclass will be given the opportunity to conduct the Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra at the Gala Concert.
It is for the sixth time that Dohnányi Academy is organising its Conducting Masterclass, during which conductors from all over the world will develop their skills under the guidance of the Master Class Director, Gábor Hollerung, and with the contribution of Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra. Coming from six countries of three continents, participating conductors will have the opportunity to present what they have learnt in a concert at the end of the Masterclass.
Mozart’s Haffner Symphony was actually first written as a serenade. Mozart composed two serenades at the request of Siegmund Haffner. The first one (K. 250) was composed for the wedding of Elisabeth Haffner. The second was commissioned by Haffner to celebrate his elevation to the nobility. After the première, Mozart requested to have this work back and revised it significantly, omitting the serenade movements and a minuet, and then had it performed as a symphony in Vienna. His letter to his father shows how satisfied he was with the reworked piece: ‘My new Haffner symphony has positively amazed me, for I had forgotten every single note of it. It must surely produce a good effect…’
The collection of folk poetry entitled Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’) was published between 1805 and 1808. This influential anthology was the embodiment of the romantic poets’ nostalgia for the “simple folk.” The young Mahler was so captivated by the direct simplicity, emotional depth, and variety of the Wunderhorn songs that these were the only texts he set to music for almost a decade. He first began working on the collection in the late 1880s; the twelve orchestral songs were composed between 1892 and 1901. In today’s concert you will hear excerpts from this song cycle.
Béla Bartók wrote his Concerto for Orchestra at the request of the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The assignment gave Bartók such inspiration and energy that he wrote Concerto in barely a month and a half. ‘He worked the happiest and most exalted of his compositions while he was in the depths of misery. Bartók’s last works, written as he was bidding farewell to Europe and settling in America, are overflowing with conciliatory and reconciling harmony, the joy of homecoming and elevation, and melodic richness. Never before had he written so melodiously and so comprehensibly as at this time; perhaps because he had never been so full of human love and compassion as at this time; he had never been able to summarize all the achievements of his life in such a powerful synthesis as at this time. The large-scale works then once again unite the greatest contrasts: written for a full symphonic orchestra, the Concerto combines the elegy of homesickness and loneliness with the glitter of astonishing and grotesque episodes and a turbulent folk festival,’ as music historian Bence Szabolcsi wrote about the work.
