Kristóf Baráti & Concerto Budapest

A propos du spectacle

This Concerto Budapest performance under the baton of András Keller casts the spotlight on two young artists: Kristóf Baráti and Péter Zombola.

Liszt Prize recipient Kristóf Baráti, winner of the Paganini Violin Competition in Moscow in 2010, has worked with conductors of the calibre of Kurt Masur, Marek Janowski, Yuri Temirkanov, Andrew Manze, Iván Fischer and Zoltán Kocsis. In recent years, he has also produced two recordings – of two Paganini violin concertos and Bach’s partitas and sonatas for solo violin – which are testament to his fantastic technical skills and high level of musicality. Playing a 1703 Stradivarius for this concert at the Palace of Arts, Baráti will perform Prokofiev’s first violin concerto, which premièred in 1923 at the Paris Opera and became part of the concert repertoire thanks to violinist József Szigeti and conductor Fritz Reiner.

Some four years Baráti’s senior and equally familiar to concert audiences, Péter Zombola was inspired by Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony to compose the five‐movement work to be premièred at this concert, dedicated to András Keller and Concerto Budapest. “Besides the stylistic influence, the mechanism of the work’s genesis is also similar,” writes the composer. “As Shostakovich reworked his String Quartet No. 8 for string orchestra, I did the same with my String Quartet No. 2, which works musically in the context of both a chamber ensemble and an orchestra. There are a number of influences and tendencies in play in my own current Chamber Symphony, principally among them the music of Shostakovich, Schubert and Arvo Pärt.”

Indirectly connected to Zombola’s composition, the Shostakovich symphony to be heard in the second half of the concert, which premièred not long after the death of Stalin, is perhaps the finest example of the Soviet composer’s individual ingenuity and respect for tradition.