The Festival Orchestra will play in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy on a one-week tour from August 22. First, we’ll be performing twice at the famous Lucerne Festival: Iván Fischer has chosen pieces by Beethoven for the first and by Wagner for the second concert. The latter will feature internationally renowned Wagner singers Camilla Nylund, Klaus Florian Vogt, and Günther Groissböck. Richard Wagner had many wonderful experiences in Lucerne, where he lived with his love, Cosima, in his beautiful house overlooking a lake; they were married there and their first son, Siegfried was also born there.

On the night of August 26, we’ll already be performing in Bonn, and the following day we can show what genuine BFO Midnight Music is... The last stop of the tour is Merano in South Tyrol, where Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 1 will be played by Nicolas Altstaedt, an “individual category” in his field, as a writer for Hamburger Abendblatt refers to him. The piece, thought lost for almost two hundred years, will be performed between Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and Beethoven’s “Eroica” before we are off to return to Hungary for the last days of summer.