On Christmas morning of 1870, which also happened to be the birthday of his wife, Cosima, Richard Wagner had a small ensemble join him by her bedroom door to wake her with a serenade he had composed: the Siegfried Idyll reworks important themes from the third act of his opera of the same title, including the melody accompanying Brünnhilde's awakening, the call of Siegfried's horn and the singing of the forest bird - here reflecting calm and balance in place of drama. Like Wagner's work, Péter Eötvös's viola concerto Respond revisits an earlier composition of his, with this current version being performed here in the composer's native country for the first time. Eötvös reworked his 1998 piece Replica in response to the pandemic situation by reducing the 49-piece orchestra to 32 while simultaneously expanding the piece itself with new musical ideas. Discussing this viola concerto, connected in many ways to his opera Three Sisters, and its title, Eötvös said: "The answers provoke new questions. In the course of the dialogue thus created, the most diverse arguments are brought in, and, like the shards of a shattered mirror, they reflect an image whose original can only be guessed at.” The music of Charles Ives is likewise incomparable to almost anything else: an insurance agent by profession, he followed unique paths with innovations that were ahead of their time. This experimentally inclined American composer began the nearly decade and a half of labour it would take to complete his most complex work, his Fourth Symphony, in 1910. This piece requiring massive forces to perform, however, would only be performed in its entirety for the first time in 1965. This concert by Concerto Budapest offers an exciting opportunity to discover (or in some cases rediscover) a piece that has never been performed at Müpa Budapest before and only once in Budapest - in 2001, then too under Eötvös's baton.

Presented by: Concerto Budapest