Hungarian Gems 3.

About the Event

In this highly‐anticipated concert, hear the mellifluous sounds of classical music by Schmidt and Liszt/Weiner at Budapest's treasured and world‐renowned Pesti Vigadó Concert Hall.

Since he was born in Bratislava, which has centuries‐old ties to Hungary, and his mother was Hungarian, Hungarian musical culture has every reason to cherish the memory of Franz Schmidt (1874‐1939), at least in part, and to rediscover his work. As a former solo cellist of the Vienna Philharmonic, but also as a professor and even rector of the Vienna Academy of Music, Schmidt is of course first and foremost one of the prominent figures in Austrian music history. But just listen to his works. His strong affinity with the Hungarian‐Gypsy song tradition, which he fuses with the sound world and structural principles of dense German late Romanticism, is immediately apparent. In addition to the orchestral Hussar Variations of the 1931 concerto, all this is also evident in the Intermezzo of his opera Notre Dame, based on the novel by Victor Hugo and premiered in 1914: Schmidt unmistakably associated such familiar motifs with the figure of Esmeralda. The other composer of the evening, Franz Liszt, on the other hand, we have always been proud to call our own. That this deep affinity is mutual is proven by such popular pieces as the Hungarian Fantasy, which was first performed in Pest in 1853. The other masterpiece representing Liszt's oeuvre in this concert is both fundamentally 'classical' and delicate this time we hear the Sonata in B minor, the large orchestral arrangement used by Leó Weiner as early as 1955, but only recently performed for the first time.