Bedřich SMETANA: The Bartered Bride – overture
Pyotr TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23
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Modest MUSSORGSKY – Maurice RAVEL: Pictures at an Exhibition

Valentin Magyar piano
Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor: Carlo Montanaro

Principal Guest Conductor

The first concert of the Hungarian National Philharmonic’s Kocsis season ticket highlights three faces of Slavic romanticism. The overture to the Czech composer Smetana’s The Bartered Bride is a rich font of energy, emotion and folk characters, while Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B-flat minor is an encounter of virtuosity with great feeling, and Pictures at an Exhibition is also a meeting point, this time between the Russian Mussorgsky and the Frenchman Ravel, the result of which was one of the most brilliantly arranged scores in music history. Valentin Magyar is the audience’s latest great favourite and it will be exciting to hear Carlo Montanaro, who frequently conducts masterpieces from Italian masters, interpreting a different kind of repertoire on this occasion.

Bedřich Smetana, the forerunner to Dvořák and the great trailblazer of Czech national music, wrote his three-act comic opera, The Bartered Bride, between 1863 and 1866. The work’s overture often appears on the concert programmes of the world’s great orchestras as an independent concert piece in its own right. Its main features are its sweeping dynamism, lively rhythms and folk-like quality of the characters. The Kocsis season ticket of the Hungarian National Philharmonic is conducted by Carlo Montanaro, a hugely popular figure in Budapest.

The second piece on the programme, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B-flat minor, is an excellent opportunity for one of Hungary’s great piano discoveries of recent years, Valentin Magyar, to show off the virtuosity and emotional richness of his playing style. The firm favourite that will complete the second part of the concert is Mussorgsky’s piano cycle, Pictures at an Exhibition, expertly arranged for orchestra by Ravel. The piece is a joyful reward for any orchestra or conductor and gives equal scope for a broad spectrum of colour to be revealed as it does for varied character depictions. If there is a composition that can without exaggeration be described as a “musical picture book”, this is it!

IT IS A GREAT PLEASURE FOR US at the Hungarian National Philharmonic to welcome Carlo Montanaro, an artist of outstanding talent and skill with whom our ensembles have enjoyed a fruitful relationship for many years, as our new principal guest conductor. Born in Cecina, the violinist and conductor kicked off his career in the early ’90s at the events of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino festival.
He was soon discovered and mentored by Zubin Mehta, one of the great maestros of our time. He has since delighted opera fans with his conducting in Warsaw, Milan, Venice, Dresden, Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, San Francisco, Tokyo and many other cities, including in Australia and South Korea. He has also taken up the baton as a guest with ensembles in Cincinnati, Atlanta, Seattle, Boston, Dallas and Fort Worth, as well as with WDR Cologne and the Orchestra dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia. In addition to his dedication to conducting opera, he is also completely at home in the world of symphonic music. At the concerts we performed together, we admired his precision and energy, his dramatic sense, the richness of his emotional
language, and his evocativeness. Our collaboration in this form will run until the end of the 2028/2029 season – and we are excitedly awaiting what Maestro Montanaro’s further guest appearances have in store!