European festival orchestra biography

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Music has a very important role in our time. Some come to concerts because they love it, others, because they hope to belong to an elite, others hope to be entertained. In the mid-1980s he founded the Budapest Festival Orchestra, where he has since introduced and established numerous innovations. In 2018, he founded the Vicenza Opera Festival; he additionally launched the Budapest Mahler Festival and the Bridging Europe Festival.

He has founded a number of festivals, including the Budapest Mahlerfest, the Bridging Europe festival and the Vicenza Opera Festival. Do you consider the Budapest Festival Orchestra as a European, rather than mainly a Hungarian, orchestra?

At first we played a few concerts every year, with great care and a festive spirit. Museums, theatres and concert halls became temples of this educated society.

Next year, I will start with a workshop of improvised music. What synergies do you see between the European Union Youth Orchestra and the Budapest Festival Orchestra?

This is a great new plan, I am very enthusiastic about it. Before the French revolution music served the aristocracy by creating and practicing “taste”, “bon goût”.

The EU needs to change its cultural policy. But at home we have developed a trust with our audiences. Because I firmly believe that music helps in the difficult process of making peace. Following guest appearances at international opera houses, he established the Iván Fischer Opera Company with a reformist vision of presenting independent opera productions that he himself also directs.

In this generation “Bildung” was the norm, the purpose of life. He has been associated with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra as Honorary Guest Conductor since 2021. For example, next week we give a concert, “Plea For Peace” in Budapest in which Ukrainian, Russian, Arab and Israeli musicians play together. Fischer regularly conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic.

But, after many discussions, we decided to keep the name because the orchestra had already a strong brand and because we considered the word festival a fitting and beautiful idea to express our goal – that we want each concert to be “festive”, and we want to avoid an every-day routine.

From day one, this orchestra has been special, completely different than the usual symphony orchestras all over the world.

We will do much more than the usual orchestra academies.