The Budapest Festival Orchestra has announced its programme for the forthcoming 2014-2015 season. In addition to orchestra concerts as well as Baroque and contemporary music evenings, the orchestra will await audiences with its own opera productions in the forthcoming season – as is tradition since the very beginning. Mozart’s The Magic Flute will be performed on three occasions in March (on 7, 9 and 11 March) at the Palace of Arts, featuring international artists: the role of the Queen of the Night will be sung by Mandy Friedrich, that of Pamina by Nuria Rial, Tamino by Bernard Richter, while Papageno will be played by Hanno Müller-Brachmann. The conductor and director of the performance will be Iván Fischer. In recent years the BFO has caused an international stir with its three Da Ponte opera performances, but The Magic Flute won’t be a new experience for them either, as they performed it at the Budapest Congress Centre in the early 1990s. This year the Bridging Europe – Európai hidak festival, organised for the second time, will focus on German culture. As part of this, Kurt Weill’s teaching-piece entitled Der Jasager, which adapts Bertolt Brecht’s and Elisabeth Hauptmann’s libretto, will be played in the Festival Theatre of the Palace of Arts. The school opera was released in 1930, and premiered in the same year in Berlin at the Zentralinstitut für Erziehung und Unterricht. It is based on a Japanese Nō drama from the 15th century, which deals with the question as to whether one should agree to being sacrificed for the community. The director of the performance, which can be seen on 10 September, is Eszter Novák. Besides opera productions, fans of beautiful voices can enjoy the performance of several world-class singers during the Festival Orchestra’s concerts, which will feature, among others, Christine Schäfer (as a soloist in the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss and Symphony No. 4 by Mahler), Tassis Christoyannis (singing the Songs of a Wayfarer) and Anna Caterina Antonacci (as a soloist in The Death of Cleopatra by Berlioz). Season tickets and tickets for the forthcoming season will be available from 10 April; for more information please visit the BFO website.