Budapest Festival Orchestra

“There is no other ensemble in the world like the Budapest Festival Orchestra.”
(Evening Standard)

Iván Fischer made his dream come true when he founded the Budapest Festival Orchestra (BFO) in 1983 together with Zoltán Kocsis. From the very beginning, the ambition of the ensemble has been to share music of the highest quality and to serve its audiences in the most diverse ways.

The BFO is rated among the top ten orchestras in the world, regularly performing at the most important concert venues of the international music scene. The BFO has won two Gramophone Awards and was nominated for a Grammy in 2013 for its recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. The BFO also received the Association of Music Critics of Argentina’s award for Best Foreign Symphony Orchestra in 2016, the Diapason d’Or for its recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in 2014, and the Italian Toblacher Komponierhäuschen prize. The BFO received the Association of Music Critics of Argentina’s award for Best Foreign Symphony Orchestra in 2016.

The BFO’s innovative concerts, such as the Autism-friendly Cocoa Concerts, Surprise Concerts, and musical marathons, are well known around the world. The Midnight Music concerts attract young adults, while the Dancing on the Square project integrates disadvantaged children. The orchestra promotes free Community Weeks and co-produces the Bridging Europe festival with Müpa Budapest.

HarrisonParrott enjoys a long-standing and ongoing collaboration with this acclaimed partnership working together on touring projects in Europe, USA and in South America. With HarrisonParrott, the BFO and Iván Fischer have appeared numerous times at the BBC Proms and Edinburgh International Festival as well as US and Canadian summer festivals including Mostly Mozart in New York.

“The great partnership of Iván Fischer and his Budapest players make music of supreme intimacy and vitality. They endow the work with a poise and lyricism too often sacrificed in favour of frenzied intensity.”

(Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian)

“Fischer’s elite band have already displayed superb Mahlerian credentials. This lovely account of the First, with its allusions to Songs of a Wayfarer, Mahler’s early vocal masterpiece, and homage, in the “stormy” finale, to that of Beethoven’s Ninth, is especially remarkable in Fischer’s delicate, chamber-like intimacy in repose and his lilting, rustic way with the Ländler-like dance rhythms.”

(The Times)

“The Rite of Spring remains a seismic event in the history of music, still astounding in a performance as gripping and as powerful as this live account by Fischer’s BFO. These Hungarians manage the remarkable feat of making this familiar music sound ever fresh and new — I love Fischer’s chamber-music textures in Dances of the Adolescent Girls, and his Dance of the Earth sounds positively volcanic…It is ravishingly played”

(The Sunday Times)

“..Iván Fischer’s beautifully judged and lucidly presented performance takes the work’s length as something utterly inevitable and authentically Schubertian in its own right. The textures are wonderfully transparent, and by getting his players in the Budapest orchestra to use natural horns, narrow bore trombones and clarinets in C, he gives an extra buoyancy to the sound, so that every line has its own character and rhythmic profile”.

(The Guardian)

“The first thing that hits you when hearing them live is their incredible purity of sound, which is perfectly blended and has an almost overwhelming impact.”

(Revista Noticias)