Liszt: Faust Symphony Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège & Gergely Madaras

• Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886): Faust Symphonie, S 108 (1854 version):
• 1 Liszt: Faust Symphonie, S 108 (1854 version): I. Erster Teil. Faust 30:05
• 2 Liszt: Faust Symphonie, S 108 (1854 version): II. Zweiter Teil. Gretchen 21:15
• 3 Liszt: Faust Symphonie, S 108 (1854 version): III. Dritter Teil. Mephistopheles 16:43
• Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S 110/2:
• 4 Liszt: Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S 110/2 11:08
• Total Runtime 01:19:11

Info for Liszt: Faust Symphony

Few literary works exerted as strong an influence on European culture in the 19th century as Goethe’s play Faust. While several important composers drew inspiration from it, Franz Liszt seems to have had a particularly close relationship with Goethe’s masterpiece. He came up with the idea of a symphony ‘in three characteristic pictures’, each devoted to a key character in the play: Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. Rather than telling the story of the play, Liszt composed a psychological exploration of these three main figures. He was also a pioneer in his use of leitmotifs, i.e. short musical ideas that underline a trait of character or evoke feelings, a process that his future son-in-law, Richard Wagner, would take even further in his operas.

The Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, led by Gergely Madaras, presents the original, purely instrumental version of the Faust Symphony from 1854. This gigantic work is complemented by the first of the Mephisto Waltzes, inspired by Nikolaus Lenau’s vision of the Faust myth. These two works offer two very different perspectives on Liszt’s intense relationship with the character of Faust, and in particular with that of Mephistopheles, around whom many of his compositions are structured. They are key works for understanding Liszt’s aesthetic project and the typical nineteenth-century tendency towards a combination of the arts.

Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège
Gergely Madaras, conductor

Gergely Madaras
is Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège since 2019. Together, they have performed across Belgium and toured to Europe and South America, having been regularily featured on Mezzo and Medici.tv and have been building an extensive discography ranging from César Franck through Liszt and Dohnányi for Alpha, BIS and Palazzetto Bru Zane labels. Gergely was previously Music Director of the Orchestre Dijon Bourgogne and Chief Conductor of the Savaria Symphony Orchestra.

As a guest conductor, Gergely’s recent highlights include engagements with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Philharmonia, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Bamberger Symphoniker, BBC Symphony and Philharmonic, Oslo Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, Hallé, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and Il Pomo d’Oro and Joyce DiDonato at the Concertgebouw, as part of their ‘EDEN’ tour.

The 2023-24 season sees Gergely return to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Musikkollegium Winterthur, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Hungarian State Opera and Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra. He makes debuts with the WDR Symphonieorchester, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Turku Philharmonic and Sao Paulo State Symphony. Future plans include appearances with the Oslo Philharmonic, Gürzenich Orchestra Köln and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.

Gergely was the inaugural Sir Charles Mackerras Fellow at the English National Opera, which culminated in his operatic debut at the London Coliseum with a new production of Die Zauberflöte with stage director Simon McBurney. Since then, he has conducted critically acclaimed productions at the Dutch National Opera, Grand Théâtre de Genève and the Hungarian State Opera. Last season, he made his debut at La Monnaie, conducting Shostakovich’s The Nose.

Whilst grounded in the core classical and romantic repertoire, Gergely maintains a close relationship with new music. He has collaborated with composers George Benjamin, Péter Eötvös, György Kurtág, Tristan Murail, Luca Francesconi, Philippe Boesmans and Pierre Boulez, for whom he served as assistant conductor at the Lucerne Festival Academy between 2011-2013.

Gergely has appeared as a regular guest at the Lucerne, Gstaad, Milano Musica, Bucharest Enescu, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Murten Classics, inClassica Dubai, Septembre Musical Montreux, MiTo Settembre Musica, Budapest Spring and the Tokyo Stradivarius music festivals and made highly praised recordings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

Born in Budapest in 1984, Gergely first began studying folk music with the last generation of authentic Hungarian gipsy and peasant musicians at the age of five. He went on to study classical flute, violin and composition, graduating from the flute faculty of the Liszt Academy in Budapest, as well as the conducting faculty of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, where he studied with Mark Stringer.

Booklet for Liszt: Faust Symphony