Bach’s The Art of Fugue has excited the general public and composers with its perfection and fragmentation for more than two hundred years. Now the Danubia Orchestra Óbuda has commissioned three Hungarian composers to express with their music what this masterpiece says to them today.

Balázs Horváth raises the music, which according to many is only for the eyes, in five very different character movements (Die Fuge der Kunst), sometimes concentrating only on rhythmic and harmonic properties, other times assigning only one pitch to each instrument, or even dressing up like electronic musical effects. And in collage, he uses 33 fragments from various contrapuncti, weaving a rug of a wide variety of styles from menuetto to rock music.

Of Péter Tornyai's three movements (Kunst oder Fügung), Intermezzo is in fact an orchestration without any addition, in which, however, the ensemble of upwards moving strings and downwards moving winds evokes endless steps reminiscent of Maurits Escher's paintings. The other movement, consisting of “25,000 points,” evokes the pointillist style of the painter Károly Keserü, while ABsCHied creates the farewell atmosphere with the BACH motif also used by Bach himself.

Máté Balogh's four movements build a series of symphonic-inspired variations (Kunstmusik), the mood of which is indicated by the fit of an opening movement dedicated to Péter Esterházy, which unleashes Bach from noise, with an ethereal-sounding slow movement evoking András Szőllősy and a march-like finale set for brass band.

The 12 movements written by the three composers will be premiered in a kaleidoscopic arrangement, like a whole-evening collective composition, on January 30, at the Academy of Music, Budapest under the direction of Benjamin Bayl.