The benefit concert of Concerto Budapest for the International Children’s Safety Service on Zoltán Kocsis‘ birthday

Maxim Rysanov, solo artist of the first concert of the series Viva La Viola! will again enjoy a prominent role, not only as a solo violist but also as a “transcriber”. Tchaikovsky’s “quasi cello concerto”, Variations on a Rococo Theme, will not only delight our online audience with the solistic virtuosity but also as the highly acclaimed 2010 viola version of the Ukrainian string celebrity. With regards to the following composition on our programme, we must mention not only one but two deeply committed "masters": a de facto professor of the instrument, Máté Szűcs and of course, Paul Hindemith, who placed his beloved instrument to the foreground of the string ensemble performing the suite he composed upon hearing of the death of the British monarch, George V in 1936. The funeral music, this time, is staged primarily in memory of Zoltán Kocsis, who would have turned 69 on this day. As the third piece of the evening, Máté Szűcs – who, as he put it in one of his interviews, consideres the viola a therapeutic instrument  – will render Bartók’s last, incomplete composition, re-arranged/re-constructed in a uniquely modern-day manner. Miklós Rakos arranged the structure of the Viola Concerto according to the Fibonacci Sequence, and after the concerts in Pécs and Geneva, Szűcs will also take to the stage as the champion of Rakos' version.