To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the orchestra, BDO will be giving a concert in Vienna, too. The aim of its programme is to present the passionate, virtuoso face of Hungarian music.
The first piece to be performed is the first movement of Levente Gyöngyösi’s Symphony No. 1. Gyöngyösi is an outstanding figure of the young generation of Hungarian composers, and his work captures the emotional diversity of love. The composer’s musical language is a mixture of classical musical thought, jazzy rhythms and the elemental nature of folklore.
Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasy is a composition of folk melodies, verbunk music and dances propagated by Hungarian gypsy musicians, complete with a vibrantly virtuosic piano solo. The soloist of the piece is János Balázs, a Hungarian pianist widely considered as the successor of the legendary György Cziffra, a worthy continuator of the Cziffra tradition not only for his phenomenal technique but also for his improvisational skills.
Bartók’s Dance Suite was written for the 50th anniversary of the unification of Pest-Buda and Óbuda (Old Buda). The work is about the common destiny of humanity. The composer combines the treasures of folk music of six nations with an impressive folk dance finale that is so characteristic of his art. With profound faith, Bartók sends a message to posterity that there is much more that unites us than what divides us.
Zoltán Kodály’s work Dances of Galánta is the result of a folk music collecting trip he made to Felvidék (or “Upper Hungary”, the area that was historically the northern part of the Kingdom of Hungary, mostly belonging to Slovakia in our days – the tr.). The work features the best of Hungarian music: verbunk music, jumping dances, bagpipe dances, and finally a clarinet solo evoking the tipsy man’s humming, followed by a drifting, whirling, truly Hungarian dance. The interesting thing about the performance is that before the start of each musical material of the piece, a “band” of musicians formed by the members of the orchestra will perform the original music, just as Kodály had probably heard it from the gypsy musicians of his childhood.
