The most characteristic details of the pieces shortlisted for the Finals will be presented to the audience at the Finals held in the Solti Hall at Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music on December 14th.
Tickets for the Finals can be purchased from October 15th via the web site of Bartók Plus Opera Festival (Tickets online booking »), or on the spot, before the performance. (Budapest, Liszt Ferenc square 8.).
ALBIN FRIES
Albin Fries: Nora
„My plan was to write a counterpart to the intellectual operas of today, an opera about love once again. Love is apparently no longer presentable with atonal contemporary musical means. The intellectual or apocalyptic operas of our time also seem no longer interested in a theme that has dominated virtually all the operas of the past. I purposely chose a sentimental libretto. Since my musical style is late Romantic tonal, the story plays between 1890 and 1910. What is the massage of the opera? Perhaps that the protagonist Arthur can only understand the pure quality of love by loving his child.”
Andorka PéterPéter Andorka: Boszorkányvér (witch-heritage)
“My work speaks allegorically about us and our relationships, but first and foremost about true love and fidelity both of which I deeply believe in. Music always closely follows the plot. I used the leitmotiv technique familiar from the operatic tradition, the way the orchestral part tells about content not spelt out in the dialogues with the help of musical hints and references creating relationships between past and present, or events you would not automatically consider related to each-other. The most important characters and a few important concepts like death, malediction and love are associated with separate musical motifs, which are combined and connected in accordance with the plot, foreshadowing events or explaining something that happened.”
JURAJ FILASJuraj Filas: Jane Eyre
„Eighteen-year-old girl Jane Eyre arrives at the Thornfield estate to serve the owner of the castle -
Lord Rochester - as the governess of his foster-daughter - eight-year-old Miss Adèle.
Jane Eyre is coming from Lowood - an orphanage where she spent many terrible years as an orphan. Mrs Reed - the widow of her uncle - who was expected to raise Jane but hated her got rid of her and sent her to Lowood. Now - after years - at the Thornfield's estate, she is finally drawing a better future.
She becomes close to the owner of the castle, whose past is unknown to her, and she does not know that he is hiding his crazy wife in the attic of the castle.
After various peripetia, Lord Rochester offers her a marriage. Jane is excited but ...
During the wedding ceremony, it turns out that the Lord is already married and thus the wedding cannot be held.
Desperate to death, unhappy Jane escapes from the castle.
She finds her new home and works in a small village with people she knows as her father's relatives. Cousin John Rivers – whose mother was Eyre, sister of Jane’s father – tells her that she has inherited a grand heir from his uncle, and asks her to go to India with him, where he - as a pastor - wants to be a missionary, but with the condition that Jane will marry him. Jane resolutely rejects the marriage without love.
In anger, John tells her that he knows of her "sinful love" to Lord Rochester, but he, according to the news, has ended badly: His mad wife lit the house and jumped down of the roof. Rochester himself lost his hand, got blind, and remained invalid.
But Jane does not hesitate and runs for his love. Their encounter is the culmination of the troubled journey of a girl who had to experience so much evil.”
VALENTIN DUBOVSZKOJValentin Dubovskoy: stone angel
„Stone Angel by Marina Tzvetayeva is classical russian literature piece. In it's core is a question how to save one's soul from all the surrounding dirt and debauchery, which have become the norm of our time. The plot is a parable, but can be easily applied to the real world. Stone Angel is a husband who has left for a long business trip. His waiting wife becomes addicted to drugs and seduced by a lady's man, for whom sex is as simple as sport. With a child from another man, with destroyed reputation woman is ready to become a prostitute. But in the end she is saved by the Mother of God and the Church of Christ.
Stone Angel's well and the Cup of Mother of God symbolize the ability to remember true Love and ignore anything other. Without it soul chastity could be easily destroyed. Kant's “moral law within” is under threat of vanishing. That danger lies in modern immorality, frivolity and loss of spiritual values.
Music matches the libretto. In the opera there is a system of leitmotifs that establish more complex connections than those that in Tsvetaeva's drama.
The existence of characters from the 1st scene foreshadows further action: Widow in the 6th scene, Rich Bride in the 5th scene, Nun in the 2nd and 4th scenes, Apple Trader in the 2nd scene. Leitmotifs establish Amur as a seducer not only as in the case with Aurora and Duchess in the 5th scene, but also with Rich Bride and Nun. Amur disguised as Angel leitmotif is an inversion of Stone Angel's leitmotif. Aurora's hallucinations accompanied with quartal harmony.”
