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.
The conductor of the evening is Róbert Farkas, our orchestra's chief conductor. He completed the first stage of his studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Hungary, and later graduated from the Berlin Conservatory. He conducts regularly in opera houses in several cities in Germany, but also frequently performs with orchestras in Hungary.