Dohnányi Orchestra Budafok

The magnificent orchestral arrangement of Liszt’s Funérailles piano piece was created by Ferenc Farkas. The composer born in 1905 who died in 2000 raised generations of young composers at the music academy founded by Liszt. The unique feature of Ernő Dohnányi’s Cello Concerto, written in 1904, when he was 27, is that it is not a virtuoso work but basically lyrical in tone. The ‘Great’ Symphony in C major was never publicly performed during the lifetime of Schubert, nor was it published; its discovery was down to sheer luck. Robert Schumann acquired the composer’s manuscript from Schubert’s brother ten years after the master’s death, and he passed it on to Felix Mendelssohn, who conducted the first full performance of the piece with the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig in 1839. Not long after this Schumann wrote enthusiastically about the symphony in the columns of Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a journal he founded, commending its masterful structuring, its “heavenly length” and astonishing innovative features even for 1840.