Pannon Philharmonic

Conductor

Zoltán Kocsis

Zoltán Kocsis was born in 1952 in Budapest, began playing the piano at age five. From 1963, he studied piano and  composition at Béla Bartók Vocational Secondary School of Music; and then he got admitted to Franz Liszt Music Academy in 1968 as a student of Pál Kadosa and… More

About the Programme

This evening, Zoltán Kocsis is conducting two compositions that are seemingly different in many ways. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's seven-movement piece was written around 1781 (presumably while composing the opera Idomeneo), the four-movement work by Bartók one and a half centuries later, in 1936. Int he Serenade, also known as Gran Partita, clearly dominate the winds: oboe, clarinet, bassethorns, horns and bassoons, accompanied by the double bass. Unlike in the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, in which composition the winds are completly lacking, however - as the title of the work suggests - major roles are given to the percussion instruments and to the strings, which due to rarely used techniques have a striking new color. There is no doubt that both songs are masterpieces, creations of composers of exceptional orchestration skills, which can sensitively balance between the sense of intimacy of chamber music and symphonic fullness.