On Zoltán Kocsis‘ birthday, Concerto Budapest’s benefit concert series with the fancy title Viva La Viola! for the International Children’s Safety Service will focus on an indisposable, fundamentally important yet frequently somewhat disregarded instrument, the viola. This auspicious day first part will provide the well-versed interpreters of the instrument with a lead role, or rather, with a series of lead roles, while featuring two 18th century jewels of the viola solo repertoire: Concerto in G major for Two Violas by the famously prolific Telemann – a violist himself – from the 1730s and a 1779 classical piece by Mozart, a Sinfonia Concertante, which puts the viola into a virtuoso and glamorous position, making it a real equal to the violin. Following the two compositions with brilliant solo parts by outstanding string instrumentalists (Janka Szomor-Mekis, László Móré, Gábor Homoky and András Keller, who will not only conduct the concert but also feature as a solo violinist), our audience can enjoy a through and through 20th-century musical treat with the participation of Maxim Rysanov, a violist who is always enthusiastically celebrated in Hungary.  Bohuslav Martinů's Rhapsody Concerto is the very piece whose 1953 premiere in Cleveland was conducted by none other than György Széll. 

Maxim Rysanov, solo artist of the first part of the series Viva La Viola! will again enjoy a prominent role, not only as a solo violist but also as a “transcriber”. Tchaikovsky’s “quasi cello concerto”, Variations on a Rococo Theme, will not only delight our online audience with the solistic virtuosity but also as the highly acclaimed 2010 viola version of the Ukrainian string celebrity. With regards to the following composition on our programme, we must mention not only one but two deeply committed "masters": a de facto professor of the instrument, Máté Szűcs and of course, Paul Hindemith, who placed his beloved instrument to the foreground of the string ensemble performing the suite he composed upon hearing of the death of the British monarch, George V in 1936. The funeral music, this time, is staged primarily in memory of Zoltán Kocsis, who would have turned 69 on this day. As the second part last piece of the evening, Máté Szűcs – who, as he put it in one of his interviews, consideres the viola a therapeutic instrument  – will render Bartók’s last, incomplete composition, re-arranged/re-constructed in a uniquely modern-day manner. Miklós Rakos arranged the structure of the Viola Concerto according to the Fibonacci Sequence, and after the concerts in Pécs and Geneva, Szűcs will also take to the stage as the champion of Rakos' version.