Irén Lovász: Amouruos Flower

This programme is held in Hungarian.

Irén Lovász, a Kossuth Prize-winning distinguished artist, is a versatile creator-performer. She began as a folk singer, and with her 1995 album World Tree, created with László Hortobágyi, she burst into the forefront of the national and international world music scene, later producing hugely successful albums with Makám and other world music formations. Her career as a vocal performer is closely connected with her scientific research and university teaching activities. Her folkloristic research is complemented by her work in the fields of religious and music anthropology, as well as sound therapy and archaeoacoustics, the essence of which is her four-part album series "Healing Sounds". At the House of Music, she presents her 2008 album Love Flower: modern adaptations, transcriptions, and compositions based on Renaissance poems, dances, historical flower songs, and folk songs - with percussionist Kornél Horváth, old plucked string instrument performer István Győri, viola da gamba artist Zsolt Szabó, and woodwind instrument player Béla Ágoston.

Her program Love Flower is high-quality popular music from the Renaissance era. The program is based on the jewels of Hungarian love poetry preserved in oral tradition and 16th-18th century manuscript songbooks and codices. Historical "hits", popular and nowadays lesser-known songs, Balassi poems, as well as adaptations and interpretations of Renaissance instrumental dances are performed. Songs living on the border between poetry and folk poetry come to life in an entertaining form in popular culture.

The performance brings to life the otherwise light, fresh old music with natural singing, the dignified, elegant string instruments of early music, the naïve charm and delicacy of traditional flutes, the primal power of bagpipes, and the virtuoso playing technique and diversity of archaic percussion instruments. The "crossover" nature of the program is guaranteed by the consciously chosen excellent musicians, who have come from seemingly distant realms of today's Hungarian folk music, early music, and experimental jazz. Each brought their own experience, knowledge, talent, creativity, and individuality to bring this centuries-old musical culture to life and make it entertaining. This new interpretation of early music and contemporary folk music has thus become very human and modern.