PREMIER series / SÁNDOR VERESS
SÁNDOR VERESS Respublica Overture
DEBUSSY Trois Poèmes de Mallarmé (arrangement by Heinz Holliger)
Performer Andrea Brassói-Jőrös soprano
Conductor Heinz Holliger
The concert will be followed by a roundtable talk led by Gergely Fazekas music historian with participants Andrea Brassói-Jőrös, Heinz Holliger and Claudio Veress.
“I consider it my great fortune that when I was 14 he started to work with me. [...] We had a very close relationship. Indeed, I received a work from him: the Passacaglia concertante that I learned from him. He attended many performances. I frequently conducted his works; he came to the rehearsals and the concert, and expressed his views of the performance very clearly.” In one of his interviews, Heinz Holliger, the perhaps best known and greatest devotee of the art of Sándor Veress, recalled the character of the Hungarian. In this concert, Holliger conducts the 1948 Respublika Overture. The piece was composed for the centenary of the 1848 War of Independence just before the artist emigrated to and settled in Switzerland. In this way, the composer was unable to receive the Kossuth Prize, which was conferred on him partly because of this very work. Debussy’s three songs with piano accompaniment was written to the verses of Mallarmé in 1913. The Debussy work is in a 2016 arrangement by Holliger, who is also active as a composer.