Concerto Budapest – Premiere I

“He was able to preserve the most important creative components of his stylistic characters in a way that minimalism did not become dogma,” said Zoltán Rácz, considered the greatest Hungarian authority on the works of Steve Reich, a few years ago. Through his many decades of untiring work, Rácz makes the musical universe of the American composer experiential and self-evident for the third and fourth generations of Hungarian concertgoers. This concert features a fresh-out-of-the-packet work played for the first time in front of a domestic audience by the master who is over 80 now, because the world premiere of Music for Ensemble and Orchestra was in Los Angeles in November 2018. The five-movement work by Reich, who has not composed for grand orchestra since 1987, contains references to his own earlier pieces, yet at the same time he pays tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach, precisely with a 5th Brandenburg concerto allusion. As Reich himself said in an interview: “It’s my little tip of the hat.”