Budapest Festival Orchestra

A musical caricature, a playful concerto, a grand operatic overture, and a surprisingly dark symphony - Takács-Nagy Gábor, awarded the Kossuth Prize in 2024, returns to lead the Festival Orchestra with the rich and varied colors of Mozart and Haydn. A specialist in the works of these composers, the conductor believes in creative risk-taking, which makes his performances consistently fresh and original. The first half of the concert will be all about wit and joy - and, of course, the playing of Alexander Sitkovetsky. A Musical Joke by Mozart, composed around the same time as Eine kleine Nachtmusik, is a parody in which Mozart gleefully mocks the amateur composers and performers of his day. Haydn’s Violin Concerto in A major was written for a young violin star of the Esterházy orchestra - barely twenty years old - as a gesture of goodwill, so that the newly joined colleagues would see each other not as rivals, but as friends. After the intermission, we’ll hear the overture to a Mozart opera completed just months before his death, followed by one of Haydn’s London symphonies - likely composed as a tribute to his departed friend. Haydn and Mozart constantly followed each other’s work, and their mutual influence is evident throughout their compositions. At times, it feels as if these two great “lighthouses” of classical music are winking at each other from above the grey seas of the musical world.