The workshop concert series of the Modern Art Orchestra (MAO) continues this season on October 24. The aim of the series has been to further broaden the repertoire of the orchestra, while offering a once-in-a-lifetime workshop opportunity to fledgling or young composers and arrangers by working on their compositions and arrangements through the rehearsal process with a mentor from the orchestra.

The series was launched in 2019 with subsidies from copyright organization Artisjus. The orchestra invited composers to apply with some experience in writing for a big band. The chosen pieces are finalized with the well-versed arrangers of the band. Mentors are members János Ávéd, Gábor Subicz, Kristóf Bacsó, Gábor Cseke, Attila Korb and bandleader Kornél Fekete-Kovács, who work with the composer in sections and in general rehearsals. The workshop is crowned by a concert for the general public. Composers featured during the first five years included Dániel Hofecker, Bence Vas, Mátyás Papp and Florin Gorgos (Vienna).

The next concert features four composers. Sisa Michalidesová from Slovakia is a well-known, award-winning composer and flutist, who published a dozen albums, featuring, among others such American stars as Benito Gonzalez and Mark Whitfield Jr. She also composes for the theater and brings to the workshop themes of a play in the making about a 17th century mass murderer, the poisoner Guiliana Tofana.

Founder of the theatrical troupe Grand Guignol, Miklós Preiszner is an actor, director, writer, and composer, who also used to play in a deep house band. MAO plays parts of his Pulp Suite, which is re-enlivening the world of American pulp fiction, recreating the buzz of a busy metropolis a few decades ago.

Works by guitarist, classic and jazz composer Tibor Hegyi have been selected for the second time in the series. He founded the New Music ensemble Fragment and has been teaching and leading student big bands. This time two orchestra pieces of his are augmented by a Monk-arrangement.

Bass player and composer-arranger Tibor Csuhaj-Barna D.L.A. has been a mainstay on the Hungarian jazz scene, he has been teaching at both the Conservatory and the Music Academy in Budapest. He has been featured on over fifty recordings. Although reminiscences of folk music can be discovered in music that he had composed earlier, his new piece for the big band explicitly deals with this kind of musical heritage.