Budapest Festival Orchestra Presented by Liszt Academy

German Reinhard Goebel journeys through all the key moments of Italian, French, Czech and German Baroque. Our guide was extolled by the New York Times as “a beacon in a sea of mediocrity.” Stravinsky supposedly made the following waspish comment about Vivaldi: “Vivaldi did not write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.” True or not, one of the greatest strengths of the Italian Baroque master was the concerto. This concert features two G minor violin concertos that Vivaldi wrote for the astoundingly virtuosic Dresden Staatskapelle, famed across Europe, which was founded in 1548 and is still operating today. After the Italian Baroque, there is also room for the French, the most innovative composer of which was Jean-Féry Rebel. His short cycle Dance Characters is the quintessence of fashionable dances of the period: it is as though characters suddenly appear for a brief moment out of the whirl of a masked ball. Reinhard Goebel was one of the individuals responsible for rediscovering the Czech Jan Dismas Zelenka. Czech folk music had a deep impact on the musical language of the composer. His art stands closest to Bach’s, although his numerous unexpected dynamic and harmonic twists and turns test the boundaries. Works by Händel and Telemann let us glimpse into other corners of the Baroque landscape. Händel probably wrote his dramatic F major trio sonata, which leads to a chromatic ending, at the age of 21. The piece was also written for the aforementioned Dresden orchestra, as was the Telemann violin concerto that winds up the concert. Telemann allows the solo violin to shine while, at the same time and virtually unnoticeably, it is gradually blended into the orchestra.