Concerto Budapest’s A Celebration of Hungary Treasures, a one-day festival held annually as a convergence point for various genres and performers from different artistic worlds, will featuring Kossuth Prize-winning violinist Kristóf Baráti returning to conduct the orchestra again at the morning concert. They will kick off with a work entitled Laudate... by Kossuth Prize-winning composer László Dubrovay, officially recognised as an Artist of the Nation, and published in 2025, which was written for solo instrument and strings. Serving as the soloist will be the flautist Orsolya Kaczander.

Typical of the composer’s style, this work also weaves together Hungarian musical traditions with the results of modern audio research and innovative playing techniques. – The Spellbound Concerto was born from the music composed by Miklós Rózsa, a Hungarian composer who later settled in Hollywood, for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, which won Rózsa his first Oscar. The concerto version, written in 1946 – for which Valentin Magyar will serve as the soloist – is one of Rózsa’s most popular works, combining the grand orchestral sound of Hollywood’s ‘golden age’ with the psychological tension that also permeates the film.

The concert will conclude with one of Bartók’s most beloved works, The Miraculous Mandarin, which was first premiered 100 years ago and, with its depiction of carnal love and its dissonance and sound world that distanced itself from the tonal sounds of the bourgeois music of the time, was met, as one of the composer’s most progressive works, primarily with utter incomprehension in its own time. The ballet would have to wait until after Bartók‘s death before it was first presented in Hungary.