Just a few months into my role as chief conductor of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, I am back conducting them in two concerts with rather unusual programmes. On 8 February, we will be performing Crisantemi by Puccini, the Pelléas et Mélisande suite by Fauré and the Rossini Stabat Mater. On 15 February, it will be the turn of Debussy’s Suite bergamasque in the orchestration by Gustave Cloez and André Caplet, the Rodrigo Concierto Andaluz for four solo guitars and the Prokofiev Classic Symphony. The programmes have been chosen with great care. I personally love bringing together Puccini and Fauré, just as I find it interesting to perform the Rodrigo Concierto and the Prokofiev Classica consecutively. Of course, the two programmes are linked by other subtle connections, such as references to music from the 1700s, the evocation of miniatures, certain dreamlike atmospheres that recall the sonority of the early 1900s, with hints of impressionism. In this context, the Rossini Stabat Mater stands out in splendid solitude at the heart of the programme. That this masterpiece was accused of excessive theatricality is a well-known story. The great interpretations which followed that first Italian performance in 1842 (conducted at the Archiginnasio in Bologna by my beloved Donizetti in person) have done justice to this composition, pervaded as it is from the first note to the last with a sense of religion which does great honour to the sequence by Jacopone da Todi. I’m impatient to show our audience the immense abilities of the Hungarian Radio Chorus and Orchestra, whose aspiration here is to bring together respect for Rossini’s structure and the majestic progression of the chorus that prepares the noble atmosphere of the finale, which is always so moving for performers and audience: “Amen, in sempiterna” in fugato style.

“On 27th January, Holocaust Memorial Day, I’m conducting a symphonic concert at the Teatro Regio di Torino. While remembrance of what happened is a universally shared legacy that is marked every year on this memorial day, I personally feel the need to keep alive the memory of the horror within the horror that denied freedom of thought and appropriated the right to marginalise and even eliminate artists and works that were not  “in order”. Musicians are giving Holocaust Memorial Day great support by proposing the works closest to their personal sensitivities and seeking to honour the deepest meaning of this commemoration in the way which they know best: through music.

Memory can be accessed through music in an infinite number of ways. For this concert, I have chosen a programme that invites reflection, starting with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, which was banned during the years of Nazism because the composer was from a Jewish family. This will be followed by one of Schubert’s ‘unfinished’ works, the less-frequently performed Symphony no. 7, because it is the incompleteness of lives that were cut short that has left the open wound of the Shoah. To end the concert, I will conduct the Shostakovich Symphony no. 9. It was written in 1945 and performed that same year by the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mravinski, and is part of the trilogy inspired by the war against Germany. However, the sense of joy that arose from the “merry little piece”, as the composer himself defined the Symphony, seemed from the outset to be contrived to the extent that, despite its perfection purely in terms of composition, it was not well received by critics in the Soviet Union, while it quickly redeemed itself in the rest of the world because it was felt to be a condemnation of the triumphalism of victors who had no consideration for the immense cost of the war in terms of human lives.