After more than 10 years, the Budapest Festival Orchestra will be returning to Salzburg in the summer of 2015, the town where Mozart was born, to play at one of the most prestigious festivals in the world. Also next year, in August, a long-term cooperation with another outstanding European festival, the Edinburgh International Festival shall be launched.
The Budapest Festival Orchestra sets out on its last tour this year on 9 December. The musicians conducted by Iván Fischer will perform the extraordinary and monumental Turangalila Symphony by Messiaen in France and Germany, which Hungarian audiences will have the opportunity to see and hear on 12, 13 and 14 December.
The orchestra went on impressive tours such as the Asian tour, where they performed in major centres of Chinese cultural life, such as Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, whilst also playing music in orphanages, secondary schools, children’s hospitals and elderly homes.
With its Dvořák-program the orchestra “held audiences spellbound” in five European cities, then in the Avery Fisher Hall in New York. As put in another review: “they generated excitement and vibration around themselves”. The two peaks of the summer season were The Proms in London, where an audience of 6,000 listened to the orchestra on two consecutive nights in the Royal Albert Hall, and their debut in the Scala in Milan, which was attended by leading politicians of Lombardy and Rome.
2015 will start with a tour in the USA, where the orchestra will play in New York and San Francisco, followed by two major international festivals. The last time the BFO performed at one of the most prominent music festivals in the world, the Salzburg Festival, was in 2001, thirteen years ago. At the beginning of August they will take the music of Béla Bartók and Gustav Mahler to Mozart’s home town, with the participation of soprano soloist Miah Persson and pianist Yefim Bronfman.
The Festival Orchestra is to launch a long-term cooperation with the Edinburgh International Festival, another highly prestigious international festival. The orchestra will make its debut in Edinburgh in August 2015. They will perform Mozart’s highly successful opera, the Marriage of Figaro, three times, conducted by Iván Fischer. This was chosen as the Best Classical Music Event of the Year in New York in 2013.
The newest opera performance to be staged by Iván Fischer, The Magic Flute, will be on the program of the Palace of Arts in Budapest on 7,9 and 11 March 2015.
