Ranki Plays For Atatürk
As you all know, couple of days ago, 10th of November to be exact, was Atatürk’s death anniversary. Even though it’s a sad day for the Turks, we like to remember him with good thoughts. There were numerous events going on in Ankara to commemorate him. I choose to go to Ranki’s act along with the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra.
Before moving on to the concert, I would like to talk about my love for the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra a bit. You’ll come to realize as you continue to read my blog, I visit the Bilkent Concert Hall frequently. If I were to point out the best part of living on campus, which I do, I would definitely say it’s having this amazing orchestra near me. This was the first concert I attended there, this semester but I plan to cover more events happening there. You can find the event calendar for this year here. All right, moving on to the concert. I bought my ticket online from Biletiva (as I mentioned on my previous post). Also a printout when I got there. By the entrance there were some pamphlets, event calendars and the detailed program for the concert along with program notes. I have to say I found the notes to be very useful. Even though I had classical training for a few years, it’s easy to forget. I loved how they explained how the instruments were used to illustrate different emotions in each concerto.
The guest of honour, Dezsö Ranki, was born in Budapest 1951, is one of the leading pianists of his country. He graduated from Franz Liszt Academy in 1973 and won the Zwickau International Robert Schumann Piano Contest while he was still a student. Since then he continues to give solo performances as well as chamber music performances all around the world. Even though I am not exactly an classical music expert, I can at least say that I highly enjoyed his act. And the audience seemed to agree considering, they made him play again twice during the brake of the concert. At the end he received a standing ovation that lasted for minutes. So it is safe to say this was a great act, to start of the season. And I made a good decision by choosing this one among the other commemoration concerts for Atatürk.
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