Erdődy Chamber Orchestra Presented by Liszt Academy

1948 – a famous and infamous year in Hungarian history, the “year of the turn”, while it also brought about a fierce struggle against ‘formalism’ in the music life of the Soviet state and coalescing Eastern bloc. Tonight’s programme offers a representative selection of Hungarian, Polish and Russian compositions from the musical harvest of this troubled year, at the same time showing up the evident contradictions. After the work by Rezső Sugár, a student of Kodály, we hear Mieczysław Weinberg’s Concertino that was dragged into a cultural policy war being fought by Soviet ideologist Andrei Zhdanov. The solo is played by Zsolt Szefcsik. In the wake of the String Serenade by Endre Szervánszky who in 1948 was also a music critic on the daily Szabad Nép, the concert closes with the Concerto of Grazyna Bacewicz who was a leading violinist of her day. The composer was presented with an award from the Polish state for this composition.