It’s rare to see someone realize their childhood dream, but now, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Müpa Budapest will help fulfill four people’s lifelong wish. They announced an amateur conductor competition for the first time and the winners – a lawyer, an anesthesiologist, an instructor and a cellist – will lead the Budapest Festival Orchestra at the sold-out closing concert of the Beethoven marathon on February 2, 2020 in the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall.
Nóra Füzi, instructor (first movement), Dr András Molnár, lawyer (second movement), Péter Szabó, cellist (third movement) and Árpád Harkányi, anesthesiologist (fourth movement) will conduct Symphony No. 7 for an audience of more than 1,500 people in the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall as part of the Beethoven marathon co-organized by the BFO and Müpa Budapest.
117 contenders entered the two-round competition, and 13 of them made it to the second round, where a jury of three experts (conductors Gergely Dubóczky, Ádám Cser and András Vass) selected the winners. Even in the second stage, the aspiring conductors had very different backgrounds – contestants included a marketing director, a child psychologist, a mechanical engineer, a tooling engineer, pianist and flutist academy students and a financial expert.
“No matter where they came from, the contestants had their admiration for Beethoven in common” – said Gergely Dubóczky, the head of the jury. “It was refreshing to see that it was all about music, and nothing else” – added Ádám Cser. “We were amazed and delighted” – said their colleague, András Vass. “Some contestants conducted the 4th movement so freely that we could hardly believe what we saw.”
The four winners will be mentored individually in the coming months in order to fully prepare them for the rehearsal with the orchestra and the actual concert to be held on February 2.
Some concerts of the Beethoven marathon still have tickets available via this link. The final concert of the event has sold out.
