Budapest Festival Orchestra and Grammy Award winning American pianist Emanuel Ax took the concert halls of Belgium, France and Italy by storm with sold-out concerts. Superb playing, humour and reinvention of the conventional classical music concert format all combined to make their performances a resounding success. In their boundless enthusiasm, the Italian audience continued cheering the Hungarian musicians even after leaving the concert hall.

In Bruges, Iván Fischer’s orchestra gave no less than 3 concerts. On the last night, the audience chose the programme and was entertained with surprise hits in between the selected pieces. This, according to the reviews, successfully disrupted the century-long imperturbable gravity of classical music concerts. As Bachtrack remarked, “Humour is a rare treat in concert halls, which might partly explain why the Budapest Festival Orchestra enjoys such a warm welcome everywhere. “This orchestra is like a well-oiled machine, and is much more than just a group of gifted musicians. The audience at the Concertgebouw in Bruges witnessed a family with a father figure who has an overwhelming love for any form of beauty and musical dialogue. And isn’t this precisely what the audience wants to hear, see and experience?”

Hungarian audiences enjoyed similar experiences at the Festival Orchestra’s Christmas concert, for which tickets are available from 28 May. Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo staged by Iván Fischer, who also composed the ending to the music himself, promises to be the greatest sensations of the season. It is making its debut at the Bridging Europe festival, which will again be organised by the BFO jointly with Müpa Budapest this September. This will be a remarkable season for the orchestra with performers such as Elisabeth Leonskaja, Vilde Frang, Truls Mørk, Jordi Savall, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Miklós Perényi, Dmitrij Kitajenko, Giovanni Sollima, Emőke Baráth and Renaud Capuçon.