The Brave Classics The Hungarian National Philharmonic, under the baton of Zoltán Kocsis, gave Schoenberg’s early work Gurre-Lieder its Hungarian première. The orchestra played all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies, together with young students, in the concert hall of the Conservatory in November 2009 between 3 pm and 11 pm taking only two breaks at “Beethoven Non-stop” concert. For years there has been great interest in our concert and semi-staged opera performances. For instance, after forty-four years, Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande was revived by Kocsis at the Miskolc International Opera Festival on 15 June 2007. The Hungarian première of Schoenberg’s opera Moses and Aaron was held in Miskolc in 2009 and subsequently in Budapest in 2010, completed with the third act composed by Zoltán Kocsis (based on Schoenberg’s drafts). Richard Strauss’s opera Daphne was performed at the Miskolc International Opera Festival in 2010 with great success, and concert performances followed in Budapest in the 2011-2012 season. We are also pleased to make forays into other genres, including an orchestra-accompanied puppet show, and the Haydn Crossover – where world-famous jazz musicians improvised on Haydn’s music. The performance of The Miraculous Mandarin, accompanied by a spectacular animation film made by Géza M. Tóth, a professor at the London Royal College of Art, to Bartók’s music was a special night.
“If there existed an interpretation history for Pelléas in Hungary, and if this opera had not only been performed at great intervals, we could say that Zoltán Kocsis’ work marked a turn. There is hardly another musician in Hungary today who knows Debussy’s world and cultural context so thoroughly and in such depth as he.” Géza Fodor, Élet és Irodalom, 22 June, 2007 “We may as well label the first symphony textbookish, the second humorous, the third pretentious, the fourth careful, the fifth cheap, the sixth long-spun, the seventh simple, the eighth perfect, and the ninth is just ‘The Ninth’, for which there is no attribute, as it stands above all basic types or basic attitudes.” Zoltán Kocsis on Beethoven’s symphonies
Andrea Rost and Zoltán Kocsis during a rehearsal
The Nutcracker’s puppets