◖ WH and Their Guests – Joy with Joy || Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Songs ◗

WH last performed a sold-out concert at the House of Music Hungary in 2023, guided by the special literary insights of translator Ádám Nádasdy. Their 2026 Epiphany concert once again places Shakespeare’s sonnets and songs at the center — as always — but this time in a uniquely polyphonic form.

The ensemble experimenting with projects crossing various musical borderlands was founded in 2006 by cellist-composer Albert Márkos — also known for numerous theatre scores — working with richly talented figures from diverse areas of the Hungarian music scene. Samu Gryllus plucks, Hunor G. Szabó plays drums, and Sena Dagadu sings the original Shakespeare texts, more than four centuries old.

This time, three women and three men meet on stage, with Tara Khozein and Anastasia Razvaljajeva joining the ensemble as guests. In this three-way stage encounter, musical forms and human connections mirror each other: canon, imitation, antiphony — through which the voices not only move side by side but react to one another, echo, intersect, and respond, just as two human gazes or two joys meet. Thus, the duet becomes a multiplication within each other — because joy, when true, answers joy.

Or, as Shakespeare puts it: joy delights in joy.