RUSSIAN CLASSICS - Csajkovszkij / Sosztakovics / Bizet-Scsedrin - Kristóf Baráti, Gábor Takács-Nagy L/4.

Gábor Takács-Nagy , our orchestra's permanent guest conductor, began his career as a violinist, and the string quartet he founded became world famous. During his time with the quartet, he lived in the United States for nearly two decades before moving back to Europe, where has become a professor at the Academy of Music of Geneva and an internationally acclaimed conductor. He has earned widespread reputation in his home country, Hungary as well. Takács-Nagy has recently recorded all of Beethoven's symphonies.

Our concert is an "excursion" to the incredibly colourful world of Russian music. Tchaikovsky's dramatic Fantasy Overture perfectly captures the essence of Shakespeare's drama, while Shostakovich's Violin Concerto was composed in 1947-48, when the country was already liberated from the terrible pressures of the Great War, but was still in the shadow of Stalin's autocracy. Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, husband of the world-famous ballet dancer Maia Plisetskaya, composed many ballets, including a ballet suite from Bizet's opera Carmen for string orchestra and percussion. The highly versatile piece follows the plot of the opera and is a very popular concert piece.

The soloist of our concert, Kristóf Baráti, was born in 1979 and started playing the violin as a child. He studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music and later in Paris. He has won prizes at several prestigious international violin competitions, his greatest success taking 1st place at the 2010 Paganini International Violin Competition in Moscow, Russia. He received the Junior Prima Prize, the Liszt, the Kossuth, the Bartók-Pásztory and the Prima prizes.