A lecture and live performance about Béla Bartók is a part of this 12 months’s Nationwide Eisteddfod Competition in Wales. The occasion, which is principally held in Welsh-language, is billed as Europe’s largest folks arts pageant.
On August 1, the Béla Bartók in Aberystwyth occasion will commemorate the 1922 live performance, which in response to the organizers, will without end be etched in Welsh music historical past. The Hungarian composer first dazzled British audiences 100 years in the past in Aberystwyth, Mid Wales, simply 30 kilometers from Tregaron, the venue for this 12 months’s Nationwide Eisteddfod, kultura.hu studies.
The Welsh-language lecture might be given by Montgomery native and musicologist Dr. Rhian Davies. Members may even be launched to various Bartók masterpieces, carried out by Welsh pianist Llŷr Williams. This historic recap of the composer’s particular go to was successful on the Nationwide Library of Wales within the spring and at Wales’ oldest classical music occasion, the Gregynog Competition.
“Forty years in the past, as a pupil within the Music Division at Aberystwyth College, I first heard about Béla Bartók’s well-known go to to the pageant, which was made doable by Sir Henry Walford Davies, the primary Creative Director of the Gregynog Competition,” stated Dr. Rhian Davies, including:
Little did I do know then that as the present Creative Director of the pageant I might comply with in Sir Davies’ footsteps and commemorate this historic second in a becoming manner on the centenary of the Bartók Concerto.”
Davies added that “It was an ideal honor to work with the main Welsh pianist of our time, Llŷr Williams, on this mission. Llŷr’s efficiency may even embody a few of the repertoire Bartók carried out in Aberystwyth – however in fact, we haven’t forgotten the Sonata.”
Based on Bálint Brunner, founding father of the Hungarian Cymru Welsh-Hungarian cultural initiative, this 12 months’s Eisteddfod is a crucial milestone in deepening the connection between the 2 international locations:
Lately, the Welsh have proven an ideal curiosity in Hungarian tradition, establishing the friendship between the 2 nations.
There isn’t a higher instance of this than the Hungarian Day in Montgomery in Might, the place tons of of Welsh and Hungarians got here collectively to commemorate the work of János Arany and to mark Might 14 because the Day of Welsh-Hungarian Friendship. In 2011, the pageant opened with the primary Welsh-language efficiency of Sir Karl Jenkins’ symphonic work Beirdd Cymru (The Bards of Wales), a Welsh-language symphony by the composer Sir Karl Jenkins. And lots of say that János Arany himself was impressed to put in writing the Montgomery legend by the phrases of English journalists who had been mocking the Eisteddfod.”
There’s one other Hungarian facet to this 12 months’s pageant: the Welsh college students of the Kodály Violin Faculty in South Wales, who’ve carried out at many Welsh-Hungarian occasions over time, together with well-known Hungarian folks songs, may even carry out.