News

The next guest of the Music Show organised by the ZeneMűvek, the Akvárium Klub and the MAV Symphony Orchestra will be the humorist András Kovács Péter (KAP) on March 8.

„The humor is the umbrella of the wise“ – said our ancestors. But how does this umbrella work? How many layers does it have? And what exactly fits under it and what does it protect us from?

With the next guest of the Music Show, the Karinthy-Ring award winner András Péter Kovács, we will primarily discuss what lies beyond humor: the individual, destinies and inspirations. Besides profound topics, there will be room for play as well; we will reveal what makes good musical humor and what is the benefit of laughing.

At the unconventional classical music talkshow created jointly by the ZeneMűvek, the Akvárium Klub and the MÁV Symphony Orchestra, the audience can meet with prominent figures of different professions. The Music Show is a fusion of the interview and the concert genre, where we talk with our guests about defining factors in reaching their goals.

The specialty of the evening is that the personal contemplation of the invited guest is accompanied by masterpieces from the classical concert repertoire played by the MÁV Symphony Orchestra. Dénes-Worowski Marcell vezényletével.

Tickets: https://akvariumklub.hu/programok/a-zene-showja-7/

Saint-Saëns, the famous French composer, has written a joyful piece in which he portrays the charming and fearsome inhabitants of the forest. It is entitled The Carnival of the Animals. On February 18, we invite you to this musical carnival of our Grandchildren and Grandparents concert series at a new location! The venue is the Eötvös 10 in Terézváros, and the concert will start at 10:30 am and at 3:30 pm. We would love if children made their own animal masks for the occasion, to wear them at the concert. We wish you a lot of fun with your creative ideas and a special concert experience!

We would love if children made their own animal masks for the occasion, to wear them at the concert. We wish you a lot of fun with your creative ideas and a special concert experience!

Tickets:
https://mavzenekar.hu/event/farsangi-mulatsag-unokak-es-nagyszulok-hangversenyei-1030/

The Hungarian premiere of Juraj Filas: Requiem, previously scheduled for January 27, 2023, in collaboration with the Hungarian National Philharmonic, is CANCELLED due to financial reasons. Instead, our orchestra is preparing with an Opera Night.

Gergely Kesselyák, our conductor tonight, has based the program of the concert specifically on three outstanding tenors of contemporary Hungarian opera life. Since he constantly monitors the opera performances of neighbouring countries, he also enjoys working with Hungarian singers of the Hungarian diaspora. This is how Titusz Tóbisz became a member of the ensemble. Tóbisz was born in Rimavská Sobota, Slovakia, studied in his hometown, then in Fiľakovo, and later at the State Conservatory of Košice. He is a former rock singer, musical singer and currently lead tenor of the State Theatre of Košice. István Horváth was born and educated in Pécs, Hungary. He is an excellent performer of bel canto and lyrical roles. Attila Fekete, who began his studies at the Pikéthy Tibor Conservatory in Vác, is one of the leading tenors of the Hungarian State Opera, and often performs abroad as well. The concert will feature additional short orchestral works between the operatic parts.

Respighi: Rossiniana – finálé
Rossini: Tell Vilmos “Asile hereditarie – Amis, amis…” / Horváth István
Leoncavallo: Bajazzók “Vesti la giubba” / Tóbisz Titusz
Verdi: A kalóz “Ah, si, ben dite…” és sztretta / Fekete Attila
Respighi: Rossiniana (első rész)
Puccini: Bohémélet “Che gelida manina!” / Horváth István
Puccini: Tosca “E lucevan le stelle” / Tóbisz Titusz
Puccini: Manon Lescaut “Donna, non vidi mai” / Fekete Attila
Respighi: Rossiniana (második rész)
Dusík: Pieseň o rodnej zemi / Tóbisz Titusz
Erkel F: Bánk bán “Hazám, hazám” / Fekete Attila

intermission

W. Korngold: Straussiana
Strauss: Rózsalovag “Di rigori armato il seno” / Horváth István
Wagner: A walkür “Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond” / Tóbisz Titusz
Wagner: A nürnbergi mesterdalnokok “Morgenlich leuchtend im rosigen Schein” / Fekete Attila
Korngold: A halott város “Oh Freund, ich werd’ sie nicht mehr wiedersehen…”  / Tóbisz Titusz és Fekete Attila
Respighi: Rossiniana (harmadik rész és finálé)
Deraco: Oceano “Un’ oda di cose mi venne… – Addio Fratelli!…” / Fekete Attila
Fekete Gy.: Excelsior! – Liszt F. áriája / Horváth István

TICKETS: https://mav.jegy.hu/program/operaest-nepszeru-reszletek-kesselyak-gergely-l3-133775

In 2023, the MÁV Symphony Orchestra will continue to offer brilliant programs for classical music enthusiasts. The regulars at our season pass concerts and the members of the orchestra’s Circle of Friends form a community worth joining, since beyond serving as a musical experience, quality concerts give a place where people can enjoy meeting in person.

The orchestra has been giving seasonal performances in Budapest since 1947, in prestigious concert halls such as the Franz Liszt Music Academy, the Müpa Budapest and the magnificent Festetics Palace, with renowned conductors and outstanding soloists.

The highly successful Tibor Szőke season pass will be launched in the second half of the 2022/23 season, on 12 January 2023 at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall in Budapest's Müpa Budapest, and altogether will consist four concerts.

At the first concert, on January 12, our audience will hear a Beethoven recital conducted by János Kovács. From Beethoven’s admirable oeuvre, Symphonies No. 1 and No. 5 (“Fate”) will be performed, along with one of the composer’s earlier works, the concert aria Ah perfido! (Ah Deceiver!), with the soprano Klára Kolonits. Although at the time Beethoven was alien from the world of opera, this work was still a success and has been frequently performed in the composer's lifetime and ever since.

The second concert on February 9 will be conducted by Róbert Farkas, Chief Conductor of the MÁV Symphony Orchestra. The program will include masterpieces by Mahler and Tchaikovsky. The evening will feature pianist Elisabeth Leonskaya, a living legend who was born in Tbilisi in 1945 and has lived in Austria since 1978. She performs in the world’s most famous concert halls and has released numerous recordings. In this concert, she will play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G major. The concert concludes with Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, which originally consisted of five movements, but the second movement was later removed by the composer. This movement is Blumine, a beautiful, romantic floral piece which is the overture to the concert and definitely deserves to be heard by the audience of our day.

With spring approaching, our orchestra will step on the stage with real world stars on March 16, 2023. The soloist will be the violinist Maxim Vengerov, a successor of the legendary Russian Violin School, whose playing fascinates violinists all over the world. Gábor Takács-Nagy, the permanent guest conductor of the MÁV Symphony Orchestra, will conduct the Beethoven Forever evening, whose brilliant career as a violinist brings extraordinary sensitivity to his conducting on every occasion. The program includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (Eroica), „the hymn of heroism and heroic behaviour”, according to music historian Dénes Bartha. Maxim Vengerov will perform Beethoven’s famous Violin Concerto.

On the fourth concert of the Masterpass on May 4, the ’The Geniuses of Romanticism’ evening will feature popular works by Berlioz and Liszt, conducted by Grammy Award-winning conductor Charles Dutoit. The two composers met and became friends around 1830. Together they coined the idea of the symphonic poem. The concert will feature Liszt’s first Piano Concerto in E flat major, performed by János Balázs, Liszt and Kossuth Prize-winning musician, as well as Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture and the Symphonie Fantastique, which still sounds modern because of the many forms of the fixa idea that permeates it.

For further information on the program and pass purhcase options, please visit our website: https://mavzenekar.hu/szoke-tibor-mesterberlet-2022-2023/

We Wish You All a Happy New Year Full of Music! kíván mindenkinek a MÁV Szimfonikus Zenekar!

The MÁV Symphony Orchestra would like to surprise its audience with a special Christmas gift. Choose one of our gift cards, and gift your loved ones with a concert experience.

Our Christmas gift cards are now available at a discount. You can purchase a gift card with the value of HUF6000 for only HUF4800, and a card with the value of HUF 20000 for HUF 16000 before the holidays.

The cards are fully redeemable for MÁV Symphony Orchestra concert passes and concerts, and you can give it further to your loved ones and acquaintances.

You can use the gift card for the MÁV Symphony Orchestra’s programmes when purchasing a ticket online by adding the ticket(s) in the basket and entering the barcode of the voucher in the Gift Card field. The final amount to be paid will be reduced accordingly.

If the value of the tickets to be purchased is higher than the amount on the gift card, the transaction can be completed by balancing the remaining amount by credit card. If the amount of the final purchase price is lower than the amount on the voucher, the difference will remain on your Gift Card, and you can use it for further purchases until the card expires.

You can find out more about our Christmas offers here: https://mav.jegy.hu/gift https://mav.jegy.hu/gift

The audience of the MÁV Symphony Orchestra concerts can often meet world-famous soloists and conductors. This time, the orchestra's guest soloist will be the Grammy-winning classical violinist Augustin Hadelich, one of the greatest violinists of our time. The program will include masterpieces by Enescu, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, conducted by András Keller, on December 1, 2022 at the Academy of Music.

Grammy-winning (2016) classical violinist Augustin Hadelich was born in Italy in 1984. He started playing the violin at the age of five, and became famous as the child prodigy. He was taught by world-famous violinists like Uto Ughi and Igor Ozim. He was seriously injured in a house fire at the age of fifteen, but he continued his studies after a gap year. Following his studies at the Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali "Pietro Mascagni" conservatory in Livorno, he graduated from the Juilliard School in New York, and has been living in the United States ever since. After winning the prestigious International Violin Competition of Indianapolis (2006), he went on stage with major orchestras (New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto), and he also regularly performs in Europe and Asia (Munich, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong). His brilliant technique, poetic sentiment and magnificent soundscape are recognized all over the world. His instrument is a "Leduc/Szeyng" Guarneri del Gesu violin from 1744.

With the MÁV Symphony Orchestra, Hadelich will perform Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major. The piece was premiered in Leipzig on January 1, 1879, with the Gewandhaus Orchestra conducted by the composer. The soloist was his friend, Joseph Joachim. Critics at the time wrote that the work was not composed for the violin, but 'against the violin'. They criticized the thickness of the orchestral texture, the over-emphasis on the orchestra's role, and the large oboe solo in the adagio. However, for the solo violinist, playing this piece is an extraordinary task, requiring a very high level of instrumental knowledge and musicality. And indeed, here the solo instrument is the 'violino principale', the dominant violin, but not a tyrannical one: it lives in loving harmony with its people, the orchestra throughout the entire piece. The Violin Concerto gives the listener the experience of an inimitable masterpiece, conceived in an astonishingly perfect unity of melodies, rhythms, harmonies, forms and emotional expression.

The concert will open with George Enescu's Romanian Rhapsody No. 1, in which the composer processes a series of folk dance melodies. Enescu’s oeuvre and personality contributed significantly to the development of the 20th century Romanian musical culture.

The evening will conclude with Tchaikovsky's final work, the Symphony in B minor. The composer dubbed the piece "Pathetic", and died merely eight days after the premiere. Following three movements of very different character, the last movement is a truly poignantly dramatic death-music. Based on the music, it is widely believed that he may have sensed his impending death; however, the composer's revelations at the time were a testimony to his vitality.

The concert will be conducted by violinist András Keller, principal conductor of Concerto Budapest. His artistic work has been recognized with the Liszt Prize, the title of Artist of Merit, the Bartók-Pásztory Prize, and in 2021, the Kossuth Prize.

Our orchestra is giving a concert on November 24, with the contribution of Cyprien Katsaris, the French-Cypriot pianist. The concert is titled ‘Connections’, and will be held at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.

If we take a closer look at the concert program, we immediately see that this time, conductor Róbert Farkas has chosen works from three renown composers, who were living and creating in almost the same era. The connections in dates: Beethoven (1770-1827), Schubert (1797-1828) and Liszt (1811-1886).

It is worth knowing that The Ruins of Athens is one of Beethoven's works related to Hungary. At the opening of the German Theatre in Pest in 1812, performances included two one-act plays by the German writer Kotzebue (1761-1819). Beethoven wrote his King Stephen Overture for the first one, which includes Hungarian verbunk (soldier songs) elements.

This evening will feature the overture to the second play, The Ruins of Athens. This is not a drama based on a real story, but an allegorical play still in vogue at the time, for which Beethoven wrote an eight-movement incidental piece for chorus and orchestra.

Liszt's oeuvre contains numerous pieces in which, out of respect for his elders and contemporaries, he made arrangements of some of their works and played them regularly at his piano recitals. It will be fascinating to hear his paraphrase of the original Beethoven work, Fantasia, which does not follow the plot of the play, but simply uses its musical material as a basis for an impressive, virtuoso piano concerto-like work, which draws the listener's attention to his native country wherever and whenever it is played.

Franz Schubert is one of the greatest composers of early Romanticism. His works include great symphonies, piano works and chamber music, but his true genre was song; he composed more than 600 songs. His song Der Wanderer is one of the saddest of them all. It was composed in 1821 to a poem by the German poet Georg Philipp Schmidt. Franz Liszt composed his virtuoso concerto for piano and orchestra from this song, which will be performed this evening by the excellent pianist Cyprien Katsaris.

The final movement of the concert is Schubert's last symphony, composed shortly before his death. The greatness of this piece is reflected by its title, which “The Great” Symphony in C major. It contains four movements, and follows the example of Schubert’s greatest idol Beethoven's in its structure, yet in its dimension and variety of harmonies, it bears the hallmarks of Romanticism. Mendelssohn premiered the symphony with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra 10 years after the composer’s death.

The soloist of the evening will be the world-famous French pianist Cyprien Katsaris, who has numerous ties to Franz Liszt. He played Liszt's Hungarian Fantasy at his first orchestral concert at the age of 15. In 2006, he gave a masterclass in Weimar, the composer's former home, for the first time since Liszt himself.