L'homme armé - 70 years of the Honvéd Male Choir

L'homme armé - a familiar medieval melody that Levente Gyöngyösi and János Vajda each quote in their works. Translated as 'The Armed Man', tonight it refers to men armed with marvellous voices: the Honvéd Male Choir. Joining them from the Honvéd Ensemble family will be the Hungarian National Dance Ensemble to perform a spectacular choreography from Kossuth Prize-winner Zoltán Zsuráfszky set to László Tolcsvay's Testamentom. The beautiful symphonic world will be conjured up by the Dohnányi Orchestra Budafok.

Hungary's sole professional male choir, the Honvéd Ensemble is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its establishment. The ringing tenors and resonant basses are singers by profession, but with their name reflecting their origins as part of the Hungarian army, it is reasonable to expect them to give the occasional concert providing a musical taste of the military life. It is a truly massive compilation of this they are now offering their audience, which will get to experience a broad spectrum of emotions in one evening through the male choir's - on the one hand, powerful and dramatic, and on the other, soft, refined and emotionally rich - singing.
The works to be performed present different aspects of a soldier's life, a theme that that the choir will use to look back at their own history and the circumstances of their founding. Two dramatic pieces - László Tolcsvay's oratorio Testamentom, which treats tragic episodes in Hungarian history in a large-scale work, and Levente Gyöngyösi's Soldier Lament. Commissioned by choirmaster Kálmán Strausz, the latter was written to texts in the Uralic languages Mordvin and Komi-Zyrian and laments the loss of young men leaving home to join the army. Representing the other point of view will be János Vajda's composition, a cantata relating an amusing story.

Conductor: Richárd Riederauer

Featuring:
mezzo-soprano - Viktória Vizin
tenor - Zoltán Nyári
bass - István Kovács
Hungarian National Dance Ensemble (artistic director: Zoltán Zsuráfszky)
Dohnányi Orchestra Budafok