By the 20th century, art had become a repository of ever-interchanging excitement and tranquillity, as well as new ideas that had never before been seen or heard. Tonight we pause for a moment to feel the calm and harmony that art can bring. Therefore, our concert offers works that provide moments of both tranquillity and excitement.
Starting with the more meditative type of music, Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra will first perform a work written in 2022 by Márton Levente Horváth, Erkel Ferenc Prize-winning young composer and organist. The audience will be treated to a somewhat low-spirited, original piece with a distinctive atmosphere, in which the organ, the queen of instruments, will play a leading role, with the composer’s contribution.
Schubert’s last symphony was written in the summer of 1825, after a long pause of many years from his previous symphonies. It was never performed during his lifetime. The manuscript was obtained by Schumann years after the composer’s death, and he immediately gave the score to Mendelssohn, who conducted the first performance of The Great Symphony in C major in 1839. The second movement offers an airy, floating music with a rhythmic background, sometimes dramatically coloured by livelier, louder passages, so we get both calm and excitement in this movement.
Mozart wrote the Haffner Serenade at 20 years old for the wedding of Marie Elisabeth Haffner, daughter of the mayor of Salzburg. The work was performed on the eve of the wedding and went far beyond the occasion, probably due to Mozart and his father’s long-standing friendship with the family. Tonight’s performance will showcase the last movement of the serenade, an adagio and allegro assai movement that begins slowly and calmly, then transforms into a joyful, upbeat piece of music.
The concert will be conducted by Ádám Cser who is also a composer, and the second half of the evening will start by his work about which he writes,
“Symphony No.6 was composed in the spring of 2022, and its second movement – ‘Night Prayer’ – was composed in the exact week of the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The historical event immediately ‘recomposed’ the original plans. At the time, I often found myself playing Bach’s chorale prelude 721 ‘Erbarm’ dich mein o Herre Gott’, or ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord God’ – and the chords got stuck in my fingers. The process went through fragmentation, and I embedded it in a whole new static sound cloud, a medium of harmony. The spiritual message of the movement is that upsetting the extremely fragile PEACE is so distressing that even its plea is only heard in a faltering way. It’s about a stunned, paralysed wonder at human horror. The second half of the movement is a personal, free form with a light parlando rhythm, responding to events with attention.”
One of Wagner’s popular orchestral works, Siegfried Idyll was inspired by a more joyous event. In fact, he composed it as a birthday present for his second wife Cosima, after the birth of their only son Siegfried in 1870. Cosima celebrated her birthday on 25th December and woke up that morning to this wonderful, captivating, intimate music flooding into her room. Wagner originally wrote the piece for chamber orchestra, and for a long time it was kept secret as a family piece, not to be published. Wagner only rewrote the work for orchestra later when he was financially strapped and had to publish something; that’s how we can enjoy this work tonight.
The concert concludes with two Mendelssohn works, the first, the Noktürn movement of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a worthy continuation of Wagner’s Idyll. The music Mendelssohn wrote for Shakespeare’s play was first performed in 1843. In this movement, a wonderful fairyland atmosphere emerges, the forest is revealed to us, covered in moonlight, and the soothing melodies transport us to the realm of fairy tales.
The final piece of the concert is Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, which he completed in 1832. The work was inspired by a ten-month trip to Italy, and the composer himself described it as the most joyful composition of his life. The work has a characteristic sparkling tone, and its last movement, Saltarello, is based on the rhythm of a Neapolitan dance. This frenetic dance movement with a wild tempo brings the work and the concert to a close, in the hope that after listening to the performed pieces, the audience will return home feeling much more relaxed, calmer and at the same time more cheerful, too.
