Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra

Founded by Iván Fischer and Zoltán Kocsis in that other music capital straddling the blue Danube, the Budapest Festival Orchestra has risen to international prominence in just 30 years. 

In 2009 Gramophone magazine ranked it amongst the world’s top ten orchestras, its concerts fill the most famous auditoria from Vienna’s Musikverein to New York’s Lincoln Center and its recordings win the most prestigious awards. 

The partnership between Fischer and his musicians has been one of the outstanding success stories in classical music. Their sound is distinctive and unmistakable, their thrilling music-making marked by spontaneity, intensity, and chamber-music like attention to detail. 

Their two concerts for the festival show the full range of their prodigious gifts. In the first, Mozart’s elegant Symphony No 40 is paired with the magisterial Bruckner work which the composer dedicated to God. In a contrasting second programme they play Borodin’s ever-popular Polovtsian Dances, Beethoven’s Symphony No 7 (described by Wagner as ‘the apotheosis of dance’), and Glazunov’s Violin Concerto, with the exceptional soloist, Renaud Capuçon. A great orchestra.