People have always used music for everything: from birth to death, every occasion has its own tune. There are people who love only the latest music, only the retro music from childhood, or there are people who even love listening hudreds of years old music. The secret of these old pieces is the resistance to time: a Mozart melody knows something, that the latest hits don’t. This something is the reason why classical musicians are learning for long decades, to perfrom the best, the most long-lasting music with the worthy instrumental and musical knowledge.
However, Danubia Orchestra believes in the completeness of music: we offer tunes for every stage of life and for every occasion, including recent hits, electronic music, contemporary opera and film music, because we believe that this way music can really belong to everyone, because as diverse as we are, is our music diverse too. What we do not compromise on is the selection and the quality of the performance, because only really good music can make our lives better. Mozart haven’t written classical- or popular music at his era – he composed music for the people of that time for the most different occasions, from the hit which can be whistled on the street, to the dirge of a secret society gathering. Mozart would not understand what is classical music.
Because there is no clasiccal music- there is only Music.
"It is not very surprising, that the people and the folk, whose otherwise wonderful anthem still builds the Hungarian identity on the theme of misfortune and penance, created a word that for example, does not exist in German and English (and in most languages). (The Hungarian word for classical music is „komoly zene” which means serious music in English.) In these countries people call Brahms, Bach and Sibelius classical music, which basicly seems a more correct approach, since in a wider meaning we use the term „classical” for arts, witticizms, or recipes, which wthstood the test of time.
And this is the main thing: we "classical musicians” (in Hungary "serious musicians") do not learn how to play an instrument for 20 years, practice daily since we were 6 years old, browse composer biographies and Kodály bicinias all summer long instead of playung football, because we are people with sunken chest and depression, and we are society-hater nerds, who preach the seriousness of art and sulk over the shallow taste of the masses for a lifetime. No! We did and do all of this, because we have discovered, that the best music pieces are the ones, which withstood the test of time, survived the brief but self-consuming flaming of 15 seconds of fame – and we would be really happy, if our beloved fellow humans would eat not only fast food, but sometimes Michelin-starred meals too. So classical music is not a genre, but a quality description. Millions of short-lived classical music pieces have been dropped out from it, but it still includes some Beatles songs, some Frank Zappa, Chick Corea concerts, and the list goes on and on.
At least, I understand that this way, and this is the reason why we at Danubia Orchestra are not picky – regarding the so called genre outings , we play Quimby, LGT, sophisticated techno, folk music, gipsy music, operetta, rock and roll, and of course the cream: Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Dohnányi and the list goes on. But the cream without the coffee… well, let's just try to imagine.
So, there is no classical music, there is only Music.”
Máté Hámori
