Two composers, not known principally for their church music. Doubters will be persuaded by the facts that for generations Puccini’s ancestors were leaders of church music in Lucca and he followed in their footsteps. Anyone not familiar with Dohnányi’s late masterpiece composed in America cannot have heard the recording made a few years ago with the Angelica Girls’ Choir, a real revelation. Now is the time to make up for what you have missed!

The world’s theatre-loving audiences owe this evergreen stage production, now a cult musical, to the inspired co-operation of Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim. The first European performance was given in London’s West End in 1958 and it has been staged in Hungary since 1969.
The special feature of this performance is that the Kiégő Izzók visual team uses inventive projection and various visual elements to add colour to the performance.

A stage version created from the scenario of Buñuel’s 1962 film, The Avenging Angel. The work has never been shown before in the theatre. According to the plot of the film, after an opera performance the Nobile couple give supper to their friends in their house in Providence Street, but with the exception of the butler all the staff have departed. As they listen to music and talk after supper, more and more of them become sleepy and although they talk about going home they are incapable of leaving. They are closed in together for days and the conditions become increasingly cruel… This inexplicable restriction makes the company ever more desperate and hysterical. The police and journalists appear around the villa, but they are unable to enter even through the open door… Buñuel surrealistic work is a study in group psychology and the psychology of the dehumanised world.
The performance in the Petőfi Literary Museum is not a pale copy of the film, but a living, biting performance, an action or “danger” theatre in which the viewers standing or sitting among the actors become part of the action. Naturally, they are only observers of the events, not victims. They see from close up what could happen to them too, how people in an extremely defenceless position lose all their refinement and outward trappings and how they are able to face themselves stripped bare.

István Kulinyi (1945, Innsbruck, Austria), winner of the Munkácsy Prize, an emblematic artist of his generation, produces graphic art, design and paintings. “Meeting with the art of hospitality” presents a side of István Kulinyi’s work rarely seen by the general public. The exhibition gives a glimpse into the world of big international hotels and the works of art selected for display in these hotels.

Right from the start an examination of the connections between the theoretical and practical aspects of art has been in the focus of János Megyik’s close to five decades of artistic activity. He studied painting in the Vienna Academy of Art (finally graduating as a glass painter), his art can be most closely related to sculpture and he has always been interested in architecture. In short: he thinks like a painter (his works are the results of his thinking on the genre of panel painting), he applies sculptural solutions (as demonstrated by his stick constructions and the iron plate works he has produced in recent years), and architecture has always been decisive for him (many works could be mentioned in this connection, from the model scale to the building-sculpture scale of the monumental Debrecen gateway).
János Megyik uses the traditional means of art as his building elements to create a refined, radical visual world. Two areas of these are worth special mention: perspective, as a means of creating form that has shaped our artistic vision for centuries, and thinking in terms of all branches of the arts which– as we have seen – spans the practical and theoretical limits of his art, from design through painting to architecture.
Gábor Sz. Szilágyi