kamara.hu – chamber music festival
November 16, 2019
7:30 pm
Budapest
Liszt Academy

KAMARA.HU – JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT
KAMARA.HU/4 – WANDERING
Chamber Music Festival of the Liszt Academy
J. S. Bach: Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 – excerpts
Mendelssohn: Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Op. 49
Kodály: Hegyi éjszakák I. (Mountain Nights)
Liszt: Elegie No. 1
Bartók: Twenty-seven Two- and Three-Part Choruses, BB 111 – Don’t Leave me, Wandering
Liszt: Elegie No. 2
Kodály: Esti dal (Evening Song)
Bartók: Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, BB 115

Artistic directors: Izabella Simon and Dénes Várjon
Henning Kraggerud, András Keller, János Pilz (violin), Jean-Guihen Queyras, Miklós Perényi (cello), Máté Szűcs (viola), Dénes Várjon, Izabella Simon (piano), Andrea Vigh (harp), Zoltán Rácz, Aurél Holló (percussion)
Cantemus Children’s Choir (conductor: Dénes Szabó)

The Grand Hall concert of the Liszt Academy’s chamber music festival conjures up virtually all the characters from the Antal Szerb novel Journey by Moonlight. The programme from Bach to Bartók lays out a good few of the complex emotions boiling in the novel’s characters. The Art of Fugue, the musical equivalent of God’s perfection, order and purity, depicts the figure of Ervin. The fairies of Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy tale world of the Ulpius siblings appear in the scherzo of the Mendelssohn trio featuring the struggle between darkness and light, while the Bartók and Kodály choirs alternately performing late Liszt works depict Mihály continuously corresponding with his home or wandering through Italy, Erzsi who gathers secrets by night, János and many others. Liszt’s works revolve around one of the central themes of the novel, death, and to top it all, Venice is also evoked in La lugubre gondola. Finally, the Bartók piece rounding off the concert hides within it one of the composer’s most beautiful examples of ‘nocturne’.