Tomorrow is the day of two concerts opening the new chamber orchestra series of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Budapest Music Center.
The first number on the show is the delightful Symphony #6, “The Morning” by Joseph Haydn. The humor and elegance of Haydn’s music always amazes me. This symphony also has a hidden violin concerto in it. It is scary how much Mozart owes to Haydn for his own violin concertos! In the slow movement the solo violin and the solo cello play an amazing duet, a variation on a Minuet-like theme. Sounds just like a Mozart violin concerto, I am telling you! In the first and the last movement the solo flute gets a lot of great music to play. What fun!
Watch this YouTube video to meet my soloist, Misi Boros! He is 11 years old and has the soul of a seasoned musician. I am not keen on child prodigies but Misi is something else. He is not only talented but also a fun and funny, intelligent human being.
http://youtube.com
For the major piece on the program I picked Beethoven’s Symphony #6, “Pastorale”. We are playing this “war horse” with a relatively small orchestra to match the space of the BMC concert hall. This decision gives me an opportunity to work on details that mostly get lost in a big orchestral setting. The end result is: lots of fun chamber music details in a very Haydn-esque Pastorale Symphony. Beethoven had his sense of humor, too!
Tag Archives: orchestra
Queen Of The Night and Private View
Tonight we concluded the 2015 Armel Opera Festival in Budapest, Hungary with two one act operas performed by the Josef Kajetán Tyl Theater (Plzeň,Czech Republic). The international jury Esther Lehoczky, Commissioning Editor of the Arts Department of Arte TV, Henry Little, Chief Executive of Orchestras Live, Dieter Kaegi, General Director of Theater and Orchestra of Biel-Solothurn-Bienne/Soleur, Kjell Englund, Managing and Artistic Director of Norrlandsoperan, Umea, Sweden and myself decided on Best Performance and Best Singer of this year’s festival.
French soprano Marlène Assayag won Best Singer Award for her performance in The Magic Flute directed by Robert Alfoldi.
Best Performance Awared went to: Van Parys: Private View performed by Muziektheater Transparant (Antwerpen, Belgium), directed by Tom Creed.
The Jury decided to give a Special Award to Pannon Philharmonic for their outstanding work in Donizetti’s The Siege of Calais and in Van Parys: Private View.
Everyone can cast a vote online for one production during the next four weeks.
Click here:
http://concert.arte.tv/fr/search/site/armel
The production that gets the most votes from the audience will be presented a prize once the voting ends. Please consider watching this years performances and voting for the one you think is the best!
May, The Month Of Bells
Two concerts with Symphony Silicon Valley this weekend, one down one more to go. On the program:
Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Overture Fantasy
Debussy: Nocturnes
Rachmaninov: The Bells
http://symphonysiliconvalley.org
This is my second time conducting Rachmaninov’s “choral symphony”. Here is my blogpost from 2013 about my performance with the Hungarian Radio Symphony with an “all about bells” theme:
http://gregoryvajda.com
The sound of the famous “Russian Bells” of course can be found in Tchaikovsky’s Overture Fantasy as well, and also in the delicate sounds of Debussy’s mezmerising Nocturnes, with female voices added to the mix of the orchestra timbres.
More bells for me in the coming weeks. In between rehearsals and performances I spent most of my time in my hotel room while in San Jose, CA. Let me tell you, I was missing out on some beautiful weather. I spent several hours preparing my score and making additional cuts to Busoni’s opera, Doctor Faust. Two semi-staged performances are coming up at the Budapest Opera. The entire opera starts with the sound of Easter Bells and ends with the sound of more bells accompanying the strange and actually pretty blasphemous apotheosis of Dr. Faust.
http://opera.hu
I am happy to have some of my Huntsville friends in Budapest for the second performance. They will be on a cruise ship on the Danube and will be stopping by in Budapest just in time to see me conduct Doktor Faust. I am looking forward to showing them around in my hometown and to spend some fun times together in my neck of the woods.
All About Horns
No, not about the fantasy-horror with Daniel Radcliffe in the main role. Huntsville Symphony’s 5th Classical concert this season was about different horns like the post horn, a tuba and French horns. Our soloist on Saturday, playing the Tuba Concerto by Williams was my good friend and amazing musician- Alan Baer, Principal Tuba, New York Philharmonic.
http://www.baertracksmusic.com
I conducted this beautiful piece a long time ago, but with a bass trombone soloist. In all honesty, the piece works much better with tuba. I am surprised that it is not on the repertoire of all the orchestras around the world. I guess it takes some courage to invite a tuba player as a soloist instead of a violinist or a piano player :). The audience loved the piece and rewarded the performance with a long standing ovation.
The second half of the concert started with one of my all time favorite compositions, the Sextet from the opera ‘Capriccio’ by Richard Strauss (I rearranged it for a small string orchestra) and ended with Till Eulenspiegel’s Marry Pranks. HSO rocked the piece!
In the first half, as an homage to Richard Strauss’s admiration for Mozart’s music we performed the Posthorn Serenade. I had the flutes, oboes and bassoons seated in the front of the orchestra. This emphasized the fact, that the two middle movements of the Serenade are really a hidden Sinfonia Concertante for woodwind instruments.
Chris Coletti http://www.trumpetchris.com
played the famous Post horn solo beautifully. Other than the famous 2nd Trio of the 2nd Menuet with the post horn in it, the trumpet section played on natural trumpets for the entire piece.
One more casual classic about The Science of Music and a classical concert with Liszt, Bartok and Brahms on the program are in store for this season with the HSO. Visit our website for details!
http://www.hso.org
Pulcinella and The Super Bowl
Apparently more than half of the population of the United States will be watching The Super Bowl today. I won’t. Well I guess this makes me the member of the biggest minority in this country. 🙂 I could actually watch it, since our afternoon show ends just on time for everyone to get home and get comfortable on the couch (I do care about our audience!). Doing a concert on Super Bowl Sunday might sound like a social and financial suicide at first. The good news is that our Casual Classics 2 called “Musical Chairs” is practically sold out.
http://hso.org
Yes, there are people who are not into football. And yes, our core audience would come out to see and hear HSO players perform Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite
http://wikipedia.org
on the day of the biggest televised event in the country.
In case you don’t know what Super Bowl is click here 😉
http://superbowl.com
During our performance “Musical Chairs” members of the audience will get to sit in and around the players while Stravinsky’s masterwork is being played and rehearsed live. There is no better way to learn about how an orchestra works and what classical musicians are capable of doing. Playing an instrument alone is complex in itself, now imagine doing it in a group and watching the conductor while listening to your fellow musicians.
I just remembered that a year ago we were doing a Casual Classics show called “Brass Attack” exactly on the day of the Super Bowl. I guess the NFL does not really care about our concert schedule. 🙂
More Pulcinella will be played and danced next week for our Young People’s Concert and for our annual free Family Concert. Works by Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Copland and Shostakovich will be performed as well.
8+1+1/2 Operas
The next year (this time I mean 365 days and not “next season”) is about to bring 8+1+1/2 operas. Let’s start with the +1. After the successful recording session and Hungarian premiere performance of Peter Eotvos’
Paradise Reloaded (Lilith)
http://eotvospeter.com
the composer, myself and the amazing sound engineers of the Hungarian Radio have just concluded the final editing of the studio recording of this work. This hopefully means that a commercial recording of the work will be out soon, most likely with the BMC (Budapest Music Center) label. A professional TV recording of the live performance at the Palace of the Arts will also be aired on TV sometimes in 2014. I will keep you posted.
The “half opera” is in fact an adaptation of the newest music theater work by Peter Eotvos. The world premiere is just happening at the end of June in Frankfurt, Germany. The opera is called ‘The Golden Dragon’
http://eotvospeter.com/commissions
and it is based on a play by famous writer, playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig. I’ll be doing the English language adaptation of this work originally written in German. This involves adapting the text to the music (I’ll be working from the official English language translation + a raw translation of the libretto) and also doing some compositional work in case it is needed.
In the next two weeks I’ll be working with one of the professional orchestras of the city of Budapest called Concerto Budapest.
http://en.concertobudapest.hu
They reside at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music where we will be performing 5 chamber operas under the title “Operatic Sketches”. One of the works is entitled Roman Fever and was written by the head of the Composition Department, Gyula Fekete.
http://www.bmc.hu
The other four works are world premieres composed by students, sung by students of the Academy of Music. The stage director is my good friend (and writer of the libretto of my one act opera, Barbie Blue) Andras Almasi Toth.
More info here:
Operatic Sketches
http://zeneakademia.hu/en
In September 2014 I’ll be the conductor of the new fully staged production of ‘The Tenor’ by Ernest von Dohnanyi. This will be the first staging of this work since the 1930s and the season opening production of Erkel Theater. Another production I am doing at the Academy of Music is, guess what, yet another Eotvos opera. 🙂 A combined group of professional and student musicians and singers and myself are presenting ‘Lady Sarashina’
http://www.eotvospeter.com
as the closing performance of Cafe Budapest (Budapest Contemporary Arts Festival) in October, 2014. This will be the fifth Eotvos stage work I conduct.
In May 2015 I am conducting a shortened version of Ferrucio Busoni’s opera, Doctor Faust
http://en.wikipedia.org
as part of the “Faust Festival” at the Hungarian State Opera.
And finally “opera #8” and obviously the most exciting challenge for me in Season 14-15 is the World Premier of my own work
Georgia Bottoms, A Comic Opera of the Modern South
Naturally I will be posting a lot about this project. For now here is a link to the book ‘Georgia Bottoms’
Mark Childress
http://www.crazyinalabama.com
You may also look up and LIKE the page ‘Georgia Bottoms, A Comic Opera of the Modern South’ on FaceBook.
Dumb Art On Oaks
First of all, let me apologize for the title of this post.
1) The more I post the more I recognize the difficulty of finding a title that draws attention and will make people read my blog entry. The more I post the more I understand the pressure on online journalists and the direction online media is going. Do I like it? Not really, but I do understand the inevitability of things going the “tabloid way”. You really don’t want to end up like “white noise”.
2) I could not resist. 🙂
3) Please, do google ‘Dumb Art’ and look at the pictures. There are awesome, great pictures there. You are going to be surprised how many amazing works of great artists you will find this way, let alone all the really great street art.
OK, now that this is out of the way, I just have to say there is nothing ‘dumb art like’ about the program I am doing with pianist Lilya Zilberstein http://lilyazilberstein.webs.com/
and the Columbus Symphony this weekend. CSO website calls this Masterworks program a “Concerto Festival” http://columbussymphony.com/
and indeed three out of the four pieces are concertos (and very different ones)
Beethoven: Leonore Overture #3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonore_Overture_No._3
Bach: Concerto for Piano and Strings in D major
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpsichord_concertos_(J._S._Bach)
Stravinsky: Concerto in Eb “Dumbarton Oaks”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerto_in_E-flat_%22Dumbarton_Oaks%22
Shostakovich: Piano Concerto #1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Concerto_No._1_(Shostakovich)
There are two other elements that make this program exciting for me.
1) “Time Travel”
OK, so you can say that every classical concert is like taking a trip back in time, and you’d be right about that. However having one of the most famous neo-classical pieces on the program (Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks) is a true artistic time travel. This piece is like a 20th Century Brandenburg Concerto. Also I dare to say, that Shostakovich Piano Concerto #1 has many neo-classical moments in it as well. This makes the second half of the program a kind of ‘homage’ to the two composers in the first half. Then there is the fact, that we are playing a Harpsichord concerto with a modern piano as the solo instrument. J.S. Bach would have loved a Steinway if he could have possibly known one. I am afraid that the sound you’ll be hearing, as wonderful as it may be, is historically inappropriate. So there is another type of time travel for you, this time to an “alternate universe”. Bach’s music on the modern piano.
2) “The Trumpet Player’s Progress” (sorry, another Stravinsky reference)
In Beethoven’s Overture our principal trumpet player will leave the stage at a certain point then he’ll play two fanfares from back stage (he shall return to finish the first orchestral trumpet part). At the end of the concert the trumpet takes center stage as the secondary solo instrument of the Shostakovich Piano Concerto. Tom Battenberg, principal trumpet is doing an amazing job as he travels with ease between styles, genres and centuries.
2 Fifths on the 5th (Huntsville Season Finale)
I guess we should have scheduled this program for May. Beethoven 5th and Prokofiev 5th on May 5th (well OK, not quite a Cinco de Mayo program). In any case, Life is writing the best script. I wanted to finish the season with this special “Symphony #5” pairing and we happened to have a date on hold at the concert hall for April 5th. Two Fifths on the Fifth is definitely a catchy title.
Despite the busy weekend in downtown Huntsville we only have under 300 tickets to sell for this show and we still have 24 hours to go. Great job, PR Marketing Department! I guess the programming is not too bad, either…:)
We had a great season in Huntsville with many new and exciting ideas and great hits. The success of the Casual Classics series has exceeded all my expectations. Taking the Free Family Concert on the road was also a viable idea (and great fun as well). We had more than one sold out classical concerts, great attendance for the POPS series. We hosted inspiring guest artists like Alexander Corsantia and the amazing Bela Fleck.
Two days ago at the Major Donor Reception our CEO and President Dan Halcomb and myself announced the 14-15 season which is going to be our 60th. More and detailed information is coming here soon. I encourage you to visit Huntsville Symphony Orchestra website in the next couple of weeks and watch our page on FaceBook and on Twitter!
Pre-Super Bowl Brass Attack
As Renee Fleming was warming up to make history as the first ever opera singer to perform the National Anthem at the Super Bowl the players of the Huntsville Symphony and myself were doing our share in history making. Seven brass players, Terry Cornett -principal percussion and myself as 2nd percussion performed the US Premiere of a piece by Peter Eotvos called ‘Brass. The Metal Space’. The special venue for our second Casual Classics concert was the Round House at the Huntsville Depot. This ‘action piece’ or ‘instrumental theater’ is a cool way to entertain audiences and educate them at the same time. The concert was all about sound and space (with a very cool glass wall in the background through which you could see an old engine outdoors), about the acoustics of a room and how a contemporary composition enables audience members to re-discover the real meaning of LISTENING. Musicians and audiences alike had a blast this afternoon, and yes, everybody made it home to watch the Super Bowl.
Yesterday evening I led the Huntsville Symphony in another US premiere. We performed ‘The Gliding of The Eagle in the Skies’ (commissioned by the Basque National Symphony) by Peter Eotvos TWICE in one concert! For the pre-concert talk I did a live Skype interview with the composer himself (another historic event for the HSO!), translating his words live to the audience. At the top of the show I introduced his orchestral piece with some demos then played it. At the top of the second half I told everyone in the hall what a great audience they were and made them listen to the Eotvos piece one more time. The Huntsville Symphony is indeed fortunate to have a sophisticated and receptive audience. People listened for the second time and from many comments I know that they appreciated the idea.
The rest of our Classical 4 concert had Alexander Korsantia playing Rachmaninov’s popular Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini. It was a highly charged, very touching and beautifully executed performance. We concluded the concert with Symphony #5 by Sibelius. This is the symphony with the musical depiction of high flying swans at the end. It was an effective ending to the show and created a nice arch with the opening “Eagle in the Skies”. Birds as symbols of freedom put into music.
Banjo And Paradise
Happy New Year Everyone! I am looking forward to an extremely busy January. My year starts with a historical concert. The “Bela Fleck Banjo Concerto” show with the Huntsville Symphony marks the highest ever single ticket sales for a classical series concert in the history of the orchestra. We are 80 some tickets short of a sell out (we’ve got one more day to go) and we are expecting a great crowd for the Saturday morning open dress rehearsal. On the program (all kind of “folk music-inspired” pieces)
Zoltan Kodaly: Variations on a Hungarian Folk Song (“The Peacock”)
Aaron Copland: El Salon Mexico
Bela Fleck: The Impostor (Concerto for Banjo and Orchestra)
Go to Bela’s website to see and hear some of the concerto (recorded with the Nashville Symphony)
http://www.belafleck.com
I am sure the audience is going to stick around for some more of Bela’s solo banjo playing at the end of the concert! Well, yes, and I am glad that the same audience is going to have the chance to listen to Kodaly and Copland.
Right after the concert I am leaving for Budapest, Hungary to dive into an exciting new opera-project. Peter Eotvos (I wrote about him and his 70th Birthday earlier) wrote an opera called Paradise Reloaded (Lilith) which was premiered in Vienna, Austria in October 2013. With the cooperation of MTVA (the mother company of the Hungarian Radio Symphony) and The Palace of The Arts (MUPA) in Budapest we are presenting the Hungarian premiere of the opera as part of the so called “Mini Festival” on January 23. Before the staged performance I get to be the conductor of the first ever studio recording of the opera (sung in German). The story is about Lilith, first wife of Adam (yes, an apocryphal story from biblical times) and the Journey of Adam, Eve with the help of Lucifer. More info here:
http://www.eotvospeter.com
