Time travel with Béla Bartók

Bartók and Kodály – we have become accustomed to seeing these two names often mentioned side by side. It is a fair pairing, since they are the ones who created the true Hungarian musical language, who reached back to the “roots”, to the true Hungarian treasure, folk music. In this concert, the artists of the concert will also present the history of the past. Ferenc Liszt, Mihály Mosonyi, Ödön Mihalovich and Jenő Hubay, in addition to composing in the European (mainly German) style of the time, felt obliged to create a Hungarian musical language. However, they saw the solution in gypsy music, in verbunkos, in folk music. They themselves felt that they had not found the right way. As Mihalovich put it: “our true language will be found by the young”. He was the one who asked Bartók to teach at the Liszt Academy, and as a young man – before he discovered folk music – he himself had composed Hungarian popular songs (nótas). The concert traces the development of the Hungarian voice from its predecessors to Bartók, and even a little further, with some songs by the young György Ligeti.