Tour: Lucerne Festival

A true legend will take the stage with the Budapest Festival Orchestra. The grande dame of the piano, the “priestess of art,” Elisabeth Leonskaja, who won the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Classical Music Awards (ICMA) in 2020, used to perform in duo with Sviatoslav Richter while conquering the world’s most prestigious concert halls. This time, she will perform one of Mozart’s most popular and grandiose piano concertos, and the only one concluding in a minor key. This piece will be framed in a special manner. The concert will open with music by Schubert, who, in addition to inventing the genre of German songs – writing more than 600 of them –, after six symphonies arrived at an entirely new orchestral language, even if the piece ultimately remained unfinished. Relationships between men and women will take center stage after the intermission. The music of Bartók’s pantomime, The Miraculous Mandarin, will come to life through a storyline that explores questions of body and soul.

Although it is referred to as the Unfinished, Symphony No. 8 is actually whole, with two completed grandiose movements. Schubert set to work composing the piece in 1822, at the height of his prowess, but was forced to leave it unfinished when the first signs of his illness, which would later lead to his death, appeared. The piece only premiered some nearly forty years following the death of the composer. The opening theme of the first movement, performed on the low strings, immediately transports the listener to an ominous atmosphere. Later, the somewhat more positive main theme is also interrupted painfully several times; there is only a glimmer of hope at the very end of the movement. The atmosphere of the second movement is even more uncertain. Sensitive ppp (extremely soft) melodies alternate with dramatic outbursts, but the movement – and, thus, the entire piece – ultimately ends on an elevated note.

Performing a Mozart piano concerto requires a pianist at least as skilled as Mozart himself, as the composer wrote these works for himself. He composed a dozen concertos for piano for his Vienna concerts between 1784 and 1786, and premiered the one in C minor at the final appearance. Of his 27 piano concertos, only two are in a minor key, and, while the C minor concerto also ends in C minor, it is less dramatic than the D minor, which brightens into a radiant major. The stormy opening movement is reminiscent of Beethoven’s style, and the chromaticism appearing throughout the piece is also quite unexpected in Mozart. Despite all this, the music has an almost chamber-like quality, just like the gentler and more serene slow movement. The concerto concludes with a variation movement assigning the winds a prominent role, shifting back and forth between minor and major keys, and rounding off the work with a rhythmic ending.

"In a manor house, three outlaws force a young girl to seduce men whom they then rob", begins Béla Bartók's description of The Miraculous Mandarin. In Menyhért Lengyel's nightmare tale, the outlaws cannot overcome the wealthy Chinese Mandarin who comes after two poor men and besieges the girl with his love. Bartók's one-act pantomime caused such a scandal at its premiere in Cologne in 1926 that the mayor banned further performances because of the openly depicted orgasm. Aside from the theme, the music is also progressive. Bartók breaks with classical tonality and uses dissonance as a means of expression. He puts the percussionists in the foreground, writes an unorthodox part for the wind instruments, and portrays the story with a wild, rhythmic, pulsating sound – at least musically. As for the spectacle, audiences will this time be able to see the pantomime interpreted by the dancers of the Éva Duda Company, known for its dynamic and daring choreographies.