Pannon Philharmonic

Conductor

Cristian Mandeal

Having studied piano, composition and conducting at the Music High School in Brasov and the Music Academy in Bucharest, Cristian Mandeal later studied with Herbert von Karajan in Berlin and with Sergiu Celibidache in Munich. He became permanent conductor at the Targu Mures Philharmonic and the Cluj Philharmonic. Between… More

Soloist

Gergely Bogányi

piano

About the Programme

Today, dance is equivalent to happiness and affirmation but it was not always so: for people of the Middle Ages, the danse macabre (the dance of death) meant a warning finger, which constantly reminded how close and inevitable  the exitus was. The four musical works, played at this concert, arching over styles and eras, show four of the uncountable many faces of dance –because everything could dance: life, death, a seducer, even the sea. Because everything dance that lives –and that doesn't live, dances too. Bogányi Gergely has a special connection to Liszt’s art and also to the religious-mystical message of the Danse Macabre. The work was inspired by a fresc of the cemetery of Pisa, the “Triumph of Death”; its re-repeated theme is the Gregorian melody Dies irae. But the music itself soon recalls the sound of the 20th century: it is not without a reason that Bartók fanaticly admired Liszt’s Danse Macabre. Debussy’s three-movement work, The Sea (La Mer) is the perfect contrast to all of this – the flooding of infinite water, the immersive dance of waves and wind.

“...to experience the depths of a musical work needs a lot of energy but at the same time, its beauty gives a great deal of energy; so the piano playing creates a kind of spiritual balance.”  Gergely Bogányi