Although the German composer Carl Reinecke worked in nearly every musical genre, his output is performed only rarely today, and his operas are no longer staged at all. His five-act romantic comic opera treating the story of King Manfred of Sicily suffered this same fate. It is well worth listening to the piece's overture, which was extraordinarily popular in Reinecke's time, if for no other reason than to detect the influence of Schumann, one of the composer's teachers.
The concert continues with a painful tale when Gábor Sipos, a winner of the Sándor Végh Competition, performs the Oscar-winning music from the 1998 film drama The Red Violin. "I was captivated,” he says, 'by how the master violin-maker memorialises his deceased wife, who died in childbirth, by mixing her blood into the varnish for one of his instruments. The baby did not survive, either. This is a horrible and desperate act; the attempt of a man who has lost his family in a matter of seconds to transport his loved ones into an eternal and immortal world - through a violin.”
Schumann was in a decidedly poor state - tormented by depression, dizziness, buzzing in his ears and pain in his limbs - when composing his Symphony No. 2. Although the piece's combative and rebellious first movement evokes his struggle with the illness gripping his body, by the end of the symphony, Schumann sweeps aside all the pain and his creative life force triumphs.

Presented by: Budapest Festival Orchestra