Conductor: Balázs Kocsár Featuring: Dániel Pataki Potyók – singer, Debrecen Kodály Choir (choirmaster: István Ella) Liszt: From the Cradle to the Grave Ferenc Farkas: Kölcsey Anthem Liszt–Farkas: Funérailles Liszt: Tasso Since 1923, the Debrecen Philharmonic Orchestra has been the premiere player in concert life in East Hungary: it also collaborates with the Csokonai Theatre in opera performances and is managed alongside the Kodály Choir. The artistic director of the institution is Balázs Kocsár who regularly conducts operas in Germany, Switzerland, Holland and Italy. Of the two symphonic poems by Franz Liszt which frame this concert, Tasso (Lamento e trionfo) was performed first in Weimar on the hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth, as an overture to his drama. From the Cradle to the Grave was written thirty years later, and is one of Liszt’s final orchestral pieces, a work with astonishing expressive power and economy, inspired by the drawings of Mihály Zichy. An attraction of the concert is the bravura orchestral arrangement of Liszt’s great piano work Funérailles, which was made by Ferenc Farkas. He lived from 1905 to 2000 and taught a generation of composers at the Budapest Academy of Music. His own oeuvre was massive, containing over seven hundred pieces, the last of which was his Kölcsey Anthem. Farkas set several verses by the Reform era Hungarian poet and author of the words of the Hungarian anthem in a grand cantata written to mark the 1100th anniversary of the Hungarians first arriving in the Carpathian Basin.

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