The LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY presents a “Hungarian connection” spanning three generations. The new work by Peter Eötvös concerns the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich. Eötvös’s compatriot Máté Bella, his junior by four decades, was inspired by Greek mythology to write his enormously sensual-sounding Lethe, about the “stream of forgetting,” for string orchestra. Stele, written in 1994, is the first orchestral work by György Kurtág, the great master of small forms, into which he channeled his grief over the loss of a friend, creating an expressive music of memory. And Dialoge by Bernd Alois Zimmermann, who would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2018, is also an homage: to Claude Debussy, another composer whose anniversary is being marked this year. But along with Debussy, Mozart, jazz elements, and the ancient Pentecostal hymn Veni, creator spiritus appear in Zimmermann’s concerto for two pianos, which abounds in quotations and allusions.
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