MÁV Symphony Orchestra

The concert begins with a world première: the new work by the Canada-resident composer of Tatar descent born in 1973, written for the 75th anniversary of the foundation of MÁV Symphony Orchestra, will be heard by an audience for the first time ever in the concert. Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) was one of the greatest Russian composers of the 20th century, on whose life, like so many of his compatriots, history left a deep impression. He fled the country at the outbreak of the Bolshevik revolution but moved back to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. His third piano concerto debuted in America in 1921, with the composer himself playing the solo. The soloist of the concert, Daniel Ciobanu, is a young and yet already highly successful Romanian pianist. Prokofiev wrote his fifth symphony in 1944, and although it depicts all the terrible suffering of war, at the end it projects a vision of a better future. Many enthusiasts rank it among the greatest works of the 20th century.