Season opening concert with Christian Tetzlaff

LISZT: 2 Episoden aus Lenau's Faust: Nightly March, Mephisto Waltz  S 110
BARTÓK: Violin Concerto No. 1, BB 48a
---intermission---
SUK: Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra in G minor, Op. 24
BARTÓK: Miraculous Mandarin Suite, BB 82

Christian Tetzlaff  violin
Concerto Budapest
Conductor: András Keller

By tradition, the music of Béla Bartók receives a prominent role in the September season-opening concerts of Concerto Budapest, and things will be no different this year. Besides Bartók and Liszt's compositions, the audience will also hear Suk's Fantasia. The concert will begin with the musical presence of the devilish violinist in Liszt's Two Episodes from Lenau’s Faust. The second part of this composition – best known as the Mephisto Waltz –  features the demonic tempter fiddling in a village tavern. Before this bewitching 2nd movement building on variation enhancement, the first episode, the much less frequently played The Nightly March, gets performed. "In our correspondence [...], he marked out two or three themes referring to me. The two movements are two portraits; the first is the young girl he loved; the second is the violinist he admired." It is how, decades later, Stefi Geyer, to whom the work is dedicated and the subject of Bartók's unrequited passion, remembered the violin concerto dating from 1907-8. The principal part composed for Geyer, just as the solo of the early 20th century Fantasia by Josef Suk, brother-in-law to Dvořák, are played by the brilliant German virtuoso Christian Tetzlaff, who has been welcomed and celebrated in Budapest on numerous occasions since 2001. The concert will be rounded off by nothing less Bartók’s great The Miraculous Mandarin, a work considered one of the most modern pieces of the composer's oeuvre. It was given its rightful place on the repertoire of the world's concert halls only after Bartók's death, but it has had an enormous impact on Hungarian music eversince.