Lots of Work and Plenty of Travel Already in 2018

Hello there and a Happy Belated New Year! I am writing this post at the Atlanta airport lounge, waiting for my flight to Huntsville, replacing the one that was just cancelled a couple of hours ago. Yes, IT IS WINTERTIME and it is coming down hard on the South now, after hitting the North-East of the US.
After a demanding and successful trip to Taiwan and Mainland China (with the Kaohsiung Symphony then with the players of the Hungarian Radio Symphony) I traveled back to Budapest for a couple of days (FYI Turkish Airlines is great!) then packed again to drive to the city of Pecs, where I got to conduct the great Pannon Philharmonic Orchestra. We presented an exciting program, including my piece, Drums Drums Drums, of which we played the Hungarian premiere. Other pieces on the program were: Weill: Little Threepenny Music, Stravinsky: Concerto in D for string orchestra and Hindemith’s powerful Concertmusic for brass and strings. As for Drum Drums Drums, it is now the third set of soloists playing it (however the drum-set part was played by the amazing Gergo Borlai again, who has been part of the World Premiere in Huntsville in 2015), and the piece, I am happy to report, works really well for the audience.
After spending a couple of days in beautiful Southern Hungary (Pecs is only about a 2hr drive from Budapest) I was ready to fly to the Big Apple. Representing Armel Festival as its Artistic Director I have attended 5 shows at the Prototype Festival. I have seen staged concert albums, multi-media music theater works and operas in the traditional sense. It was an impressive line up. I hope that Prototype Festival can become a partner for Armel by as early as 2020, and together we can bring some interesting new works to Budapest, Vienna, and to the screen of ARTE TV as well. Yes, IT IS WINTERTIME, and NYC was way colder than usual. However in the summer I always complain about humidity and high temperatures in manhattan. 🙂
I am ready for a couple of extremely exciting and challenging programs in the next couple of weeks. On Saturday with the Huntsville Symphony I will be conducting Brahms’ Haydn Variations, Beethoven’s Symphony No.7, and sharing the stage again with Elina VĂ€hĂ€lĂ€ from Finland, who’ll be playing Berg’s beautiful Violin Concerto. More information on the concert here:

http://www.hso.org

After Huntsville it’s Budapest time again, and time for music about machines with the Danubia Symphony at the Liszt Academy. Yes, you read that right, MACHINES!

More about that later!

Until then, here is the link for your enjoyment:

http://www.odz.hu

Equal Crossing Roads

I’ve spent the last week at the Budapest Music Center teaching conducting at the “Boulez 90” masterclass for conductors and composers.
The masterclass was organized by the International Eotvos Institute Foundation
http://eotvospeter.com
The final concert of the master class, conducted by select students can be listened to live here
http://radio.hu Just click on Radio/ Bartok and start listening at 1:35PM EST
The Eotvos Foundation printed some great fliers for the master class and the concert as well. They picked traffic signs like “Equal Crossing Roads”
http://wikipedia.org
to represent the main message of the events.
Philippe Manoury
http://wikipedia.org
and
Matthias Pintscher
http://matthiaspintscher.com
are crossing roads for two days here in Budapest. They arrived yesterday, gave lectures and participated in a discussion for the ‘MUSTmeet Composer’ Series with my moderation and will be here for the concert tomorrow. The Hungarian Radio is doing interviews with both of them and the Goethe Institut Budapest, one of the sponsors of the events is making a video about the master class and the concert as well. I will post the video on FaceBook as soon as it becomes available.

Credits to my fellow professors: Peter Eotvos, Jean Philippe Wurtz
http://ensemble-linea.com
to THReNSeMBle
http://www.thrensemble.com
and to the staff of the International Eotvos Institute Foundation for making this master course a success!
I had a lot of fun!

Paris, Weimar, Budapest

The international conducting workshop organized by
http://www.eotvosmusicfoundation.org
has begun. 14 students from Paris, Weimar and Budapest are working with three professors:
Ulrich Poehl
http://www.ulrichpoehl.com
Jean-Philippe Wurtz
http://www.ensemble-linea.com
and myself.
Tomorrow afternoon the members of
http://www.thrensemble.com
will be joining us.
On the program:
Philippe Manoury: Passacaille pour Tokyo
Pierre Boulez: Derive 2
Matthias Pintscher: Occultation
Hindemith: Kammermusik no.1

We are all lucky to enjoy the luxurious facilities of the Budapest Music Center.
http://bmc.hu

The conducting workshop is supported by
Institute Francais Budapest
http://www.franciaintezet.hu
Goethe Institut Ungarn
http://www.goethe.de/ins/hu/bud/huindex.htm
Liszt Music Academy
http://zeneakademia.hu

Threepenny Concert

If you subscribed to one of our concert series (3 concerts each) in the 2013-14 season you got a concert for free. The “free” concert of one of the series’ is happening tomorrow at the newly renovated Franz Liszt Academy of Music.
I designed the program to let every section of the Hungarian Radio Symphony and individual players to shine.

Kurt Weill: Little Threepenny Music
(for woodwinds, brass, banjo, piano, accordion and percussion)
Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
(the title says it all â˜ș)
Hindemith: Concert Music for Brass and Strings Op. 50
(this one is a great showpiece orchestrated for 12 brass instruments and strings [no 2nd violin!] in the duration of 20 some minutes)
Ravel: Bolero
(no explanation needed I hope, this is definitely the piece to prove that you are the master of your own instrument)

These four pieces were written between 1928 and 1936. By this time or soon three of the four composers were living in the United States. Europe was marching towards WWII dragging the entire world along. As almost always in the time of massive changes art was thriving. I wanted to put together a program with 4 completely different yet equally energetic and powerful compositions from this era. As usual you can listen to the concert live at
http://www.radio.hu
at 1:30PM EST tomorrow (Friday) or stream it later for another two weeks.
On Saturday afternoon my orchestra and I will be spending a couple of hours in Studio 6 of the Hungarian Radio to present the Bartok piece with some entertaining and informative talk by musicologist Sandor Kovacs in front of a live audience. This episode of the series “Musically Speaking” will be aired at a later time on Radio Bartok (all in Hungarian of course â˜ș)