MOBILE RED HEDGEHOG - Flipbook - Page 11
Brahms at the Tavern
Dr Jon Banks speaker
Brahms’s Hungarian Dances and Liszt’s Hungarian
Rhapsodies are among their most famous works,
and the wider influence of Hungarian ‘Gypsy
Bands’ on the great romantic composers is wellknown. The bands themselves, however, have
remained in the shadows, and assumed to belong
to an unknowable oral tradition of which nothing
remains apart from some highly exoticised literary
hyperbole.
This talk presents the opposite side of the story.
Based on the research for Jon Banks’s Hungarian
‘Gypsy-Band’ Music in Vienna, 1850–1914, to be
published this June, it reanimates world of “Gypsy
Bands” and the places they played. Alongside
images and anecdotes from the Viennese press, it
presents some of the earliest recordings of this
music, issued shortly after Brahms died and made
by artists that he almost certainly heard.
Come and meet some extraordinary personalities
and a new angle on music in old Vienna!
