This year, at the All Souls Day concert, no requiem, not even a church composition, is featured. The programme reveals the universal nature of mourning, farewell and apotheosis. Mozart considered Free Masonry something like a parallel church, which had its own moral norms, sacred goals, internal hierarchy, the experience of transcendence, just like the Catholic Church. Still, there is something bourgeois, enlightened about it, which is not restricted by the liturgical church music tradition. Mozart wrote the Masonic Funeral Music to pay homage to two of his fellow-masons: it is a purely orchestral piece with no text, constructed of symbols and emotions. In this sense, it is a precursor of Romantic symphonic poems; in its orchestration, as compared to his usual orchestral technique, Mozart employs a surprisingly large wind section, especially in the deep registers. Strauss' Four Last Songs is detached from the period's language and his own former compositions; it takes farewell from life in a captivating, film score-like, late-Romantic style. The programme is closed with Sibelius last symphony, written over a long period of time with several complicated drafts until it was completed in a single movement and the key of C major, also in a Romantic tone.
5. 30 PM - Speaking of grief and music – Commemoration event (in Hungarian)
In connection with All Souls Day, we can remember our dead at the concert dedicated to the memory of the coronavirus victims and at the joint candle lighting in a dignified environment and community. Besides, we can soothe the pain of grief and loss with the help of an informal and friendly-toned discussion. Talking about music and grief, Maestro András Vass and Bereavement Counsellor Orsolya Graf help processing loss in one of the rooms in the Kodály Centre. Please, register in advance in the ticket office of the Kodály Centre.
