The film showcasing the unprecedented concert collaboration of Concerto Budapest and Kremerata Baltica recorded in Müpa on 4 December, 2019 will have its international premiere on MEZZO TV at 8.30 pm on 29 May, 2020.
The artistic friendship between András Keller, the conductor of the concert and the world-famous violinist Gidon Kremer is well-known; it was the union of their orchestras this time, however, that conveyed the sense of individual transiency and of global cataclysm with an exceptional force. The massive musical venture arched from the Adagietto movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 to the Chaconne of Busoni's transcription of J.S: Bach's Violin partita no. 2 in D minor arranged for string ensemble by Gidon Kremer himself, to Schnittke’s rarely performed masterpiece, his Violin concerto No. 3, finally coming to the Hungarian premiere of Weinberg’s poignant and highly revelational Symphony No. 21 („Kaddish”), which was dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Warsaw ghetto by the Polish-born Jewish composer.
The producer and chief director of the concert movie commissioned by MEZZO TV was Imre Szabó Stein, while Katalin Gémes acted as Müpa’s local television director, the movie crew’s co-director was Dávid Géczy. Vilius Keras was responsible for the film’s sound, Bence Mukli acted as editor and Attila Lecza as chief editor.
As Imre Szabó Stein put it: „We used two days of live concerts for the movie. To Müpa’s excellent eight-camera TV team, I added a four-camera unit, as instead of the conventional descriptive concert material we wanted to produce a much more innovative film content recreating the movement, the birth, the flow of music using many more cuts. Consequently, the chief editor of the film, Attila Lecza was of great help to me in the post-production phase. It is no concert film in the traditional sense of the word, as such an enterprise would have required a much longer shooting period and a studio context: it is much rather a live-video recording with some movie inclination, which is meant to serve music with some self-awareness of its own. It is quite unusual and is certainly an honour that in my person an external director was given this opportunity.”
It is with this grandiose concert recording that Concerto Budapest led by András Keller for 13 years makes its debut on MEZZO TV where only one other Hungarian orchestra – the Budapest Festival Orchestra - has had the chance to feature regularly.