Ádám Szokolay Presented by Liszt Academy

Pictures, symbols, impressions and association games characterize one of the great trends in the music of the turn of the century. With the intention of avoiding the traditional genres, soundscape and forms of expression of the 19th century, composers – searching for sometimes dreamily subjective, sometimes raw and robotic, but always fresh and modern creative solutions – frequently gave their works provocative titles sparking generous image associations. Instead of musical structures playing with the effect of the series of dramatic events, they preferred to use relatively brief forms thought-provoking in their conciseness, and even in their series or multi-movement works they tended towards establishing loose relations or mirror-like structures in place of the grandiose dramatic spans of earlier compositional mentality. Ádám Szokolay’s programme for this concert is picked from just such compositions, from the gaunt and sombre tonal Grey Clouds by Liszt through Debussy’s hidden cycle (some consider that the three pieces performed here and dating from 1904 were conceived by the composer as sequential elements of some kind of continuous narrative) all the way to the Out of Doors piano series (1926) by Bartók.