Budapest
…like the whispering of trees
Lukács season ticket 1
This concert will open and close with works by teenagers. Mozart was 18 years old when he composed his four-movement Symphony in A major. At the mid-point of his life, one could say. As he had almost exactly that much time left – with a difference of only a few weeks – before he met his fate. It is a truly professional composition, opening and closing fresh and lively movements, an andante that refrains from overdoing the passions and an elegant minuet. Georges Bizet was in no more than his 17th spring when he started work on his likewise four-movement Symphony in C major. This was his first serious effort in the genre. (Mozart had already written a number of symphonies before the A major, and would go on to compose a dozen more afterwards.) Interestingly, the first movement of the young Frenchman’s work resembles the music of Mozart. The second movement recalls Berlioz, with a romantically soaring melody highly appropriate for the year 1855. Between the two pieces by youngsters, the orchestra will play the music of a mature man who kept a bit of his childhood with him well past middle age. Even in his advanced years, Paul Hindemith enjoyed playing with his model railroad at home. His music also reveals a kind of playful streak. He felt that, even in the 20th century, it was worth resurrecting the pulsing motor-like rhythmic world and polyphonic weaving of different parts of Baroque concertos, along with, of course, more modern – harsher and sharper – harmonies.