Comprenhensible Music 1: The Bible by Händel, Frá (2021/2021), Hljómsveitarstjóri Gábor Hollerung, Liszt Academy, Budapest, Hungary

Comprehensible Music is Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra’s most popular Sunday morning concert series, in which Gábor Hollerung analyses a previously selected work in Hungarian, illustrated by some musical excerpts. After the intermission, the orchestra plays the entire work without interruption. In this concert, you will hear the second part, the Passion from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, which is his most popular work until our day and one of the most frequently performed oratorios in the world. It was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742, and its ‘triumphal march’ continued with concerts in London the following year. For Handel, it was extremely important that all the texts were performed at the concerts he conducted, as he was perhaps the only composer in the history of music to work exclusively from verbatim quotations from the Bible (the libretto was compiled by his friend and collaborator Charles Jennens). This morning, the audience will hear it interpreted by the Budapest Academic Choral Society, a regular performing partner of Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra.