Pannon Philharmonic

Conductor

Tibor Bogányi

In 2017/2018, he is spending his seventh season as chief conductor of the Pannon Philharmonic.

Tibor Bogányi is of Hungarian descent and is regarded as the most interesting and talented member of the generation of Finnish conductors. At the age of 28 he was appointed Chief Conductor of… More

Soloist

Olli Mustonen

piano

Olli Mustonen is a postmodern composer building a bridge over Western classical music from baroque to minimalism, from late romanticism to the new spirituality of the 21st century. Music can capture the secret of life – a current of sounds.… More

About the Programme

Karol Szymanowski, one of the greatest Polish composers of the early 20th century completed his Concert Overture in 1904. The piece, following the idiom of Richard Strauss's symphonic poems was the composer's first orchestral work, which, however, in terms of sophistication and orchestration wouldn’t come short to the later smashing symphonies and chamber music works of Szymanowski. It was Elsa, his wife, who introduced Ottorino Respighi to the mystery of Gregorian chant as well as the Roman Gradual containing Mass chants. Respighi selected some of them from this book to his three-movement concerto, which was premiered in 1925 New Year's Eve in New York. At the concert, the composer himself played as a pianist. The final piece of the programme is Symphony No. 2 by Johannes Brahms, premiering a little less than a year after Symphony No. 1 which, burdened with the composer’s uncertainty, had taken decades to finish. The unusual speed and light, energetic tone indicates: by then, Brahms managed to get rid of his inhibitions against the genre, and caught up with the most notable symphony composers of the 19th century.