The Budapest Festival Orchestra is planning to return to normal concert activity according to a detailed plan that the Music Director Iván Fischer is sharing with the audience now.
“Like all orchestras, the Budapest Festival Orchestra had to pause giving orchestral concerts during the lockdown period. But we have been extremely active: all members of the orchestra took part in over 70 Quarantine soirées and serenades in Budapest live and online. We turned the necessity into a virtue and transformed the symphony orchestra overnight into a chamber music society. I want to thank and congratulate all our musicians and staff members who managed this challenging period so successfully.
Now I want to share our Roadmap with you, how we plan to return to normal concert activity. We assume that regular concerts can restart step by step after the summer.
Unless a new wave of the pandemic forces us to modify our plans, from the 10th of August we shall invite a small audience to our Quarantine soirées which we will continue to stream but which will be renamed Live soirées.
On the 30th of August we will celebrate the restart of our live orchestral concerts. To express our joy and pay tribute to the Beethoven anniversary year we will perform his 9th symphony in an open-air concert on Heroes’ Square in Budapest. For this large-scale concert presented with the help of the Municipality of Budapest we invite Czech, Slovak, Austrian, Romanian and Hungarian choruses to sing and celebrate together and we expect many thousand listeners on Heroes’ Square.
Normal orchestral concerts will resume from the 10th of September in the concert halls of Budapest, hopefully again to capacity audiences. This year’s Bridging Europe festival in co-production with Müpa Budapest later in September will be devoted to the music of Great Britain, a country with which we would like to maintain close cultural relations even after their departure from the EU.
Our first full-scale orchestra tour will take the BFO to Switzerland and we go ahead with the yearly Vicenza Opera Festival in October, as planned. In November we will give concerts in China, including the city Wuhan, from where the spread of the coronavirus started but where many music-lovers live who need music as much as all of us do. I am looking forward to seeing you in many concert halls of the world in the near future.”
Iván Fischer
