Sebő Ensemble,Márta Sebestyén, Petar Ralchev (BG), Georgi Yanev (BG): Metric poetry

On the first weekend of October, the House of Music Hungary will welcome Ferenc Sebő, who turns 75 this year, with two special curatorial weekends of concerts. On Saturday, 1 October, the Sebő Ensemble will take to the stage with Márta Sebestyén and two special guests, accordionist Petar Ralchev and violinist Georgi Yanev, two of the greats of Bulgarian music.

The concert will lead us through a forest of couplets, hexameters and anapaests, inviting us on an extraordinary musical journey from the Odes of Horace to modern Bulgarian dance music. A celebration of poetry interwoven with music, of melody as poetry, performed by the best artists in the genre. For nearly five decades, the Sebő Band has introduced generations of people to the asymmetrical rhythms of the Balkans. Their sung poems have provided many of us with a fitting musical context for one of the most beautiful and time-honoured traditions in world literature: quantative meter. Given that in many of his verse settings he has combined the verse forms known since antiquity with the asymmetrical rhythms and characteristic melodic line of the Balkans, Bulgaria and Macedonia in particular, this is no surprise. The affinity between the two phenomena is almost fateful, and perhaps not entirely coincidental, since geographically both derive from the Hellenic culture. Márta Sebestyén's reputation as a former singer of the Sebő ensemble is also intertwined with the poems she has sung, and her authentic interpretation of the songs of the Balkan peoples has continued to be an important part of her artistic image throughout her later career. These virtuoso instrumentalists, who have played together since childhood, are legends in their own country, and they are household names among devoted fans of Balkan music worldwide.