“I dedicate my all, my entire being to the matter,” Miklós Perényi once said about his performance artist humility. His fine cello skills will on this occasion evoke profoundly personal confessions of homesickness, nostalgia and the sorrow of man. The B minor cello concerto started in Dvořák’s final year in America became probably the most popular concerto of the given string instrument by the composer, who consistently believed that – in the wake of an earlier failure – the cello was not truly capable of handling such a prominent role. It is a true masculine piece. This is how Brahms, perceptively, characterized this Dvořák composition; in turn, Brahms is represented at the concert through his Symphony No. 1 only completed with great difficulty after gaps that lasted years and even decades. Brahms, who was finally released from the paralysis induced by the shadow of the Beethoven oeuvre partly through a clearly recognizable lifting of an Ode to Joy passage, replied sarcastically when this resemblance was pointed out that “any fool can see that”. The conductor is Gábor Takács-Nagy, who became hugely inspirational in this ‘job’ after a triumphant career as chamber musician.