Salzburg Festival Orchestra
The Salzburg Festival Orchestra was founded by Tibor Bényi in 2001. The ensemble based on the traditions of the Salzburg Academy of Chamber Music specialises mainly in the music of Mozart and his age. The orchestra works with renowned soloists, but also places great emphasis on introducing talented young musicians. The orchestra is still under the direction of Tibor Bényi. He completed cello studies at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music and has been living in Salzburg since 1991. At the beginning of his career he twice won first prize in the International Cello Competition (1978, 1984). He regularly serves on the jury for international cello competitions and since 1998 has been holding master courses in Bolzano. He is conductor and soloist of the Salzburg Mozart Chamber Orchestra and artistic director of the Academy of Chamber Music.

The orchestra was formed in 1993of the most eminent students at the Ferenc Liszt University of Music. The founder and artistic director of the ensemble is Domonkos Héja, who in 1998 won the International Conducting Competition organised by Hungarian Television. In 2001 it won the title National Youth Orchestra. This year the ensemble will make its first CD featuring dance melodies by well known Hungarian composers. Their connection with dance is recent: they perform for the evening of choreographies to music of Dohnányi in the Opera House.

Leos Janáček
In 2004 the world of culture is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Czech composer. The composer’s oeuvre is closely related to the work of Dvořák and Smetana. The spiritual kinship is also reflected in the fact that the compositions of Janáček too are imbued with Czech musical folklore or, more precisely, that of his native region, Moravia. He composed the Glagolitic Mass in 1926, two years before his death. Although the work is liturgical in structure and is written in an old Slav liturgical language, it is not at all a religious work: “I wanted to express my faith in the security of the nation…” said the composer. It is interesting to note that after the Festival the National Choir and the Budapest Concert Orchestra (MÁV) will also perform the work.

Czech Philharmonic Choir
The mixed choir was established in 1990 in the Moravian city of Brno. The professional choir concentrates its attention mainly on the performance of church music, oratorios and masses. They have earned acclaim in the continent’s important music centres, from Rome, through Lucerne to Stuttgart, are guests at prestigious festivals such as the Vienna Easter Festival, the Klangbogen Wien, the Lucerne Festival and, of course, the Prague Spring. Last year they participated in the Czech cultural season in France. Their artistic director Petr Fiala, conductor and composer, is professor of the Brno Conservatory.

Henrietta Lednárová
The soprano, one of the soloists for the Glagolitic mass, studied at the Bratislava Conservatory and in the college of music. Already as a student she made her international début, singing in Germany, Denmark and Great Britain. She appeared in a rarely performed Mozart opera, Lucio Silla with the Bratislava Chamber Opera and she has been invited by a number of chamber ensembles to participate in their recordings. She has performed in Vienna and Milan. Ondrej Lenard, who is well known in Budapest from the International Conducting Competition, gave her the soprano solo of the Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, and she has also worked with Aldo Ceccato and Claudio Abbado.

Eva Blahová
A mezzo-soprano, her first teacher was her father, Janko Blaho. She studied in Bratislava at the Academy of Performing Arts and in Vienna (with Robert Schollum), then attended the master courses of Erik Werba (Salzburg) and Daniel Ferro (Sienna). She now teaches at the Vienna summer academy, mainly dealing with the performance of the Viennese classics. She has appeared on concert stages with such excellent partners as Ludovit Rajter, Josef Suk, Marian Lapsansky, Edita Gruberová, and Peter Dvorsky. She can also boast of famous students, such as the phenomenally talented and beautiful mezzo, Magdalena Kozena, as well as Gustav Belacek and Alina Gurina.

Martin Gurbal
Bass singer, born in 1974, another pride of Slovak voice training. He studied at the Košice conservatory and joined the Ostrava Opera House in 2001. In the same year he made his début in Hungary singing the bass solo in Verdi’s Requiem together with an international line-up at the Bartók+Verdi Miskolc International Opera Festival. He has entered and won prizes in a number of Czech and Slovak singing competitions. He makes regular appearances with the Košice and Žilina symphony orchestras and is a guest artist of the opera company of the Slovak National Theatre (Košice).

Anželika Cholina, the choreographer of this performance based on the musical world of Astor Piazzolla, was born in Vilnius in 1970. She graduated from the Vilnius Ballet School in 1989, then continued her studies in the Moscow Theatre Academy, graduating in 1996 as a dancer-choreographer. She created her first works in the early 1990s, as a student of choreography in Moscow: these choreographic miniatures were followed in 1993 by her first full-length, one-act ballet, The Life of the Street, for students of the Vilnius Ballet School. In 1994 she created Bolero based on the music of Ravel, a choreography for the Lithuanian National Opera’s Ballet Ensemble. In the following years she produced a series of opera choreographies and continued her dance miniatures. In 1996 her first two-act ballet, Medea, was premiered. From that year she has also been working as a choreographer for fashion shows and then also for films.
In 1998 Cholina choreographed a contemporary dance performance titled Women’s Songs, drawing on the music and ideas of Marlene Dietrich’s songs, and in the same year she also produced a Carmen. In 1999 she choreographed a performance titled Coco in collaboration with the director O. Koršunovas – the piece was performed as the overture to the In Vogue International Fashion Festival held in Vilnius. In 2000 the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre staged her choreography of The House of Bernarda Alba. In the same year she made her debut in London’s Millennium Dome with the Tango in F now to be shown in Budapest; it was also performed one year later by the dancers of her own company, the Anželika Cholina Dance Theatre. In the past three years Cholina has been producing choreographies for her own company which she formed in December 2000. They regularly hold their premieres in the Lithuanian National Drama Theatre. Last year the choreographer presented a dance drama titled Love and this year a Romeo and Juliet, both with her own company. The latter was her most ambitious work to date: the performance involves twenty-four artists – opera singers, actors and dancers.
Anželika Cholina is internationally recognised as the leading figure of Lithuanian dance. In the ten years of her career she has created five full-length dance dramas and around forty miniatures. Her basic aim in her energetic, expressive creations is to combine the tools of dance and drama to create a new quality of performing arts.
Anželika Cholina on the performance: “This is perhaps my emotionally richest performance. The process of its creation was extremely important and exciting for me. I encountered a great variety of roles and performers and I had to reveal them first of all to themselves. This piece demands raw emotions, which is why it sometimes happens that the performers wound each other psychologically on the stage – the performers therefore need to remind themselves again and again: this is only theatre … the drama melts away the borderline between theatre and reality.”