march 28, 2017

An appeal from the BFO

This is an appeal to our friends, our audience members and to everyone concerned about musical life in Budapest: please help us save the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s community programmes.

Your help is needed for the young people’s operas we organise for children. Your help is needed for hundreds of underprivileged young people in the countryside for whom we organise dance rehearsals over several months so that they can perform at Heroes’ Square, one of Budapest’s most beautiful and important spots, forming a real partnership and community with the Festival Orchestra. The Dancing on the Square project is not only about music and dancing together, but also about mutual responsibility, tolerance and respect.

Your help is also needed for the European community and the people of Budapest for whom we organise a festival bridging the countries of this continent year after year. Bridging Europe is a festival that was started so that everyone could learn about each other’s culture and values, to understand and accept each other using music, dance, literature and art.

The financing of these concerts is now under threat as the Municipality of Budapest didn’t fully restore the funding for the orchestra’s activities. This year, 100 million HUF is needed to ensure the programmes which help to reinforce communities go ahead.

We could just stick to our concert hall programmes since we are not obliged to organise community projects. However, whenever we leave the concert hall, we notice how much music means to people. We go wherever we are needed.

We therefore ask our fellow artists to help by appearing and taking part in our Concert for Budapest evening on 8th May 2017 at the Budapest Congress Center. Eszter Csákányi, Pál Mácsai, Ferenc Snétberger and Béla Szakcsi-Lakatos will join us for this special fundraising event and we would like to please you with other surprises as well. We kindly ask the Hungarian government and the Municipality of Budapest to support this concert and, consequently, the continuation of our community activities. We also ask our friends, audience members to support those who cannot make it to our concert hall by making donations, buying tickets and attending our concerts.

You can buy tickets in three different categories (10.000 HUF, 15.000 HUF and 20.000 HUF) here: