Modern Art Orchestra gives highlighted attention to the AOV-artists and their connections in the 2021/22-season. The ten concerts of the season will introduce the compositions of the ten branches of the project with an invited AOV-composer guest each time.

The Art of Virus project goes live and MAO will play the new compositions orchestrated for big band and also involve the audience to the self-reflective space of the AOV-project.

The concert in January 2022 is dedicated to the AOV-branch #1 that was started by Péter Eötvös, the world-known composer and music educator. One of the evening’s special guests will be György Kurtág jr. whose passion for connecting instrumentality with digital music ensures the audience of unique sound experience. Gregory Vajda will also join the concert, and conduct the 20-member grand orchestra.
Compositions from Kurtág jr. and Vajda will be played by MAO grand orchestra as part of the program.

György Kurtág Jr. is a truly unique member of the contemporary music community. While he is an active composer - especially interested in computer music - he also conducts research in and mentors the upcoming generations of digital music. Collective Intelligence Theory, among other influences, motivates Kurtág to record, analyze and possibly predict human musical gestures. György Kurtág Jr. was nominated by Gregory Vajda to take part in AOV.

Gregory Vajda completed his musical studies under the mentorship of Ervin Lukács and Péter Eötvös. Vajda is a worldwide acknowledged conductor, composer and clarinetist. He conducted orchestras such as the Danubia Symphonic Orchestra, the Hungarian National Opera Orchestra, or Pannon Philharmonics, but he has an extensive history with several US-orchestras as well. Having conducted orchestras like the Portland Festival Symphony, Symphony Silicon Valley, Omaha Symphony and the Calgary Philharmonic, Vajda is currently the conductor of the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra. Hailed as a “young titan” by the Montreal Gazette after conducting the Montreal Symphony in Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Schoenberg’s Erwartung, Gregory Vajda is debuting in New York’s Carnegie Hall this december, when he will conduct the Strauss Symphony of America in the popular concert series, Salute to Vienna New Year’s Concert. Vajda joined Art Of Virus after the nomination of Péter Eötvös. He was the one who invited György Kurtág Jr. to join the AOV-project.

About the Art of Virus:

Kornél Fekete-Kovács, the art director of MAO launched nine notes and passed these to ten well-known composers worldwide during the 2020-quarantine of the pandemic. He asked to compose short pieces from these notes and pass on the composing opportunity to two other musicians. The international project got very successful in the course of a few months and 486 composers joined AOV from 42 countries worldwide.

The artistic aim of the AOV-project based on international cooperation of composers is to symbolise the spreading and the behaviour of the virus in the form of a constantly widening (mutating) range of compositions.
(https://aov.mao.hu)

The Art of Virus project of Modern Art Orchestra is a positive reaction to the global existential crisis that arrived with the pandemic. It gives answers to the urgent questions about re-defining culture in the form of positive reflection about music, art-theory and performing art from the perspective of music.