/// FILM ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
» I am Not Your Friend
Thursday, 7 October 2010 19:00
Uneasy relations between the sexes are made all the worse by several men's bad behavior in this comedy-drama from director György Pálfi. Sára loves Márk and he loves her as well, but he also loves Sophie, who does not like being cheated; she would rather someone pampered her. That someone could be András; it is just that he is already pampering his wife, Rita. She in turn has a mercenary interest in caring for young Natasha...
This group of contemporary Budapest inhabitants is bound together by complicated, mercenary relations, extorting emotions, and humiliating bonds of dependence. This highly cynical mosaic of alienating relationships came together in 20 days of improvisation by the filmmakers and nine amateur actors. The film received its North American premiere at the 2009Toronto International Film Festival.
György Pálfi the director of the provocative and absurd Taxidermia (2006), the emotional and deep Hukkle (2002) introduces a realistic and utterly complicated web of relationships between average human beings in nowadays’ society.
This exhibition features the runner-up of the Hungarian Cultural Centre’s open call to Hungarian artists from last year to design a space specific installation.
In the focus of Ádám Kokesch’s experimentations we find traditional painting techniques, today’s explosive expansion of technology, and the issue of how the two meet in art.
He has earned his reputation with his hinterglass paintings, a technique (the painting is done on the reverse side of the glass pane) which lends his paintings engineered precision and exciting colours. Anyone less versed in the natural sciences would be fooled into taking his pictographic shapes for simplified models of scientific theorems. However, Kokesch’s paintings only flirt with the semblance of science and classic abstraction, while they might be best described as subjective thought structures. He draws his data from a base he calls Data Gate. “The point,” he says, “of Data Gate as an object is not that it has spatial dimensions; it should rather be called an illustration, though, for the sake of the illusion of precision we might want to call it a model. Data Gate is flat against the plane of the wall, in the traditional position of a painting, but in reality, it is more of a window, a screen.”
Kokesch uses traditional genres of image and object creation to model a virtual, fictitious and utopian world. To achieve this, he turns to the operating methods and language of computer technology, in which the most varied sign systems can be connected. The poetry of variability.
Like his previous works, his new “maquette” reminds one of a naïve and coarse architectural model, created with the recycling of everyday objects, trash and other discarded material. Though the materials had been subjected to careful and meticulous procedures, they only carry minimal marks which makes their identification impossible but allows for a free flow of associations. The end result of the procedure suggests the image of a sterile laboratory.
/// MUSIC /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
» A remembrance evening of 1956 with the members of the Philharmonia Hungarica
Monday, 25 October 2010 19:00
Part 1: István Karácsonyi (violin) and Gabriella Karácsonyi (piano) will perform the following pieces:
Béla Bartók: Sonata for Solo Violin: III. Melodia. Adagio
Béla Bartók: Andante – for Violin and Piano
Béla Bartók: Rhapsody No. 1. for Violin and Piano (Prima parte 'lassu': Moderato; Seconda parte 'friss': Allegretto moderato)
Zoltán Kodály: Adagio – for Violin and Piano
Béla Bartók: Romanian Folk Dances - for Piano
Johannes Brahms: 2 Hungarian Dances
Part2: Ms Vali Tóth will be in conversation with the musicians and Ms Magdalena Williams, daughter of one of the founding members of the orchestra.
The Philharmonia Hungarica was established by Hungarian musicians who had fled their homeland after it was invaded by Soviet troops. It was a symphony orchestra, based in Germany, in a small city of Marl which existed from 1956 to 2001.
This refugee ensemble gathered together some of Hungary's finest musical talents and was directed by none other than Zoltán Rozsnyai, former conductor of the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra. They first performed in the Vienna Konzerthaus on 28th May 1957.
Through the ardent efforts of Rozsnyai and honorary president Antal Doráti, the Philharmonia Hungarica quickly matured into one of Europe's most distinguished orchestras supported by the perpetual humanitarian Yehudi Menuhin.
During the 1970s, Doráti and the orchestra, under contract with Decca Records, made a recording of the complete cycle of Joseph Haydn's symphonies. During its existence, the Hungarica released over 130 discs and performed in 250 cities all over the world. It accompanied great stars like Pavarotti, Carreras, Ashkenazy, Heinrich Schiff and Menuhin.
From the orchestra's inception, the West German government generously funded them throughout the Cold War and continued even after the Iron Curtain fell in 1990. The full withdrawal of state subsidies at the start of 2001, combined with the long-term decline in concert attendances in general, aggravated the financial problems that threatened the orchestra's survival.
The beleaguered Philharmonia Hungarica finally disbanded after giving a farewell concert in Düsseldorf on 22nd April 2001.
