On Thursday 23rd February, InClassica welcomes the Savaria Symphony Orchestra to the Coca-Cola Arena, led by one of their own compatriots, Hungarian conductor Gergely Madaras, and joined by a group of legendary musician from their home nation – the virtuoso violinist Roby Lakatos, alongside Jeno Lisztes on the cimbalom, Vilmos Csikos on the double bass and Robert Szakcsi Lakatos on the piano. The musicians will start the evening with Composer-in-Residence Alexey Shor’s 13-movement cycle, Well Tempered Chanson, where they will be presenting a special arrangement of the contemporary composer’s work prepared by Roby Lakatos himself. Inspired by the folk music of the Soviet era, the cycle takes the cosmopolitan culture that developed in Odessa during the 1920s as a point of departure to undertake a musical journey, describing a time full of radical changes. With a fine sense of irony discernible in the reference to Bach, Shor reevaluates the urban romances, or ‘chansons’, that were looked down upon at the time, while borrowing from various baroque, classical and Latin American sources. After an interval, the orchestra returns with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, a work on the subject of fate written in 1888. Despite the symphony’s modern popularity, public reaction following its premiere was somewhat muted, with the intricate work perplexing many contemporary critics. Nonetheless, it has gone on to become one of Tchaikovsky’s most popular works, replete with the composer’s rich and skillful orchestration, and widely seen as one of his most important compositions.
