Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi & MÁV Symphony Orchestra

Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi has an extremely close relationship with MÁV Symphony Orchestra. He won the First International Conductors’ Competition of Hungarian Television in 1974, launching him on a stratospheric international career. His connection with MÁV is special because this ensemble played in the first round of the competition, and as he himself said, they were the first orchestra he had conducted outside his own homeland, and the friendly, helpful reception he received from MÁV Symphonics was of great help in the other rounds of the contest as well. In the past decades he has conducted the orchestra virtually every season; he was elected honorary guest conductor in 2014. ▪ Mozart’s Requiem is especially famous on the one hand for the mysterious circumstances in which it was composed, and on the other hand because Mozart composed it on his deathbed and it almost seems to project the experience of dying itself. He was unable to complete the work so Süssmayr, his most faithful student, completed the missing parts using the notes of Mozart.