Conversational Concertos - Haydn & Mozart

On the programme for the closing concert of the 2024 Haydneum Autumn Festival – in addition to the last keyboard concerto written by the festival’s namesake, with its popular Rondo all’Ungarese movement, and Mozart’s ‘Jeuenhomme’ concerto, which has been praised as the composer’s Eroica among other plaudits – are some excerpts featuring soloist Petra Somlai from a very special and rarely heard composition: Anna von Schaden’s piano concerto in B-flat major. A contemporary of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s famed for her improvisational talents, von Schaden completed the work with the help of the composer Antonio Rosetti. On hand to discuss this ‘four-handed’ composition and the other pieces being performed at this closing concert with conductor György Vashegyi, the founder of the Orfeo Orchestra, will be András Batta.

Born into a music-loving family in Pécs in 1981, Petra Somlai started studying the piano at an early age. Her talent and dedication to the music profession revealed itself early on and never flagged even during her youth, leading to awards and outright victories at competitions both in Hungary and abroad. She often serves as a soloist with orchestras in historically informed performances of both familiar and lesser-known classical works, frequently conducting the ensembles as well while she plays. The chief source of inspiration for her research is discovering Hungarian-related works from the Classical and Romantic era.

György Vashegyi was born in Budapest in 1970. He began his musical career as an instrumentalist, studying the violin, flute, oboe and harpsichord. The Hungarian music world has regarded him as a top expert on early music for decades. In 1991, he founded the Budapest-based Orfeo Orchestra, which has also gained renown as one of our country’s outstanding interpreters of early music: although their repertoire focuses on the period from the late Renaissance to the Viennese Classicists, they have also played compositions from later eras on numerous occasions.