Bridging Europe Festival

Budapest 27 September
Roma 12-16 October

Founded by Iván Fischer in 2013, Budapest’s Bridging Europe Festival is held every year at Müpa, the city’s Palace of the Arts and one of Hungary’s most modern cultural institutions. In addition to “classical” music concerts, the Festival also offers jazz, pop music, and film screenings. Over the years, each event has focused on a country or group of countries with a rich and diversified culture and significant musical traditions, because a country’s music also tells us a lot about its citizens.

For the 2023 edition, Italy is the chosen country, and the partner will be the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia Orchestra. The 2023 Bridging Europe Festival, then, will link Rome and Budapest with a musical bridge that will include famed Hungarian composers juxtaposed with the “soundtrack” with which Respighi portrayed the thousand faces of the Eternal City in his three most well-known tone poems: Pines of Rome, Fountains of Rome, and Roman Festivals. On 27 September, Fischer, the most important Hungarian conductor on the international scene, will thus be conducting the Santa Cecilia Orchestra as it performs “Roman trilogy” in Budapest.

The programme will then be repeated – with the addition of projections by the video artist Yuri Ancarani and two choral pieces by Franz Liszt – for the inauguration of the 2023-2024 symphonic season, on 12, 13, and 14 October (in collaboration with the Rome Film Festival).

Meanwhile, on 15 October, the baton will be passed to the Budapest Festival Orchestra as it performs Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2 and Piano Concerto no. 1, and Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin, to be accompanied by the choreography of the Eva Duda Dance Company, founded by Eva Duda more than a decade ago. The prestigious Hungarian modern dance company has gained prominence for its exploration aimed at blending tradition and innovation. Over the past ten years, it has also worked with various guest choreographers from all over the world, establishing solid links with a number of organizations, like the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, the National Dance Theatre of Hungary, and the MU Theatre. The ballet The Miraculous Mandarin was composed by Bartók in 1918-19, and its first complete performance in Cologne caused a scandal. Immediately after the première, due to the obscene plot (three tramps forcing girl to attract and seduce men to be robbed), Cologne’s mayor at the time, future chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Konrad Adenauer, prohibited any further performances.

On 16 October, as part of the chamber season and outside the subscription series, the soloists of the Budapest Festival Orchestra will perform music by Kodály, by his contemporary Kurtág (1926), and by the Finnish composer Jaako Kuusisto (1974-2022), as well as Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet no. 1, op. 11, while opening with Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles for Wind Quintet to mark the centennial of the composer’s birth.

At the box office of the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone and at Via Vittoria 6, the subscription package for the concerts in Rome at the Bridging Europe Festival is already available.

Options for three concerts (October 13, 15, and 16, 2023) range from 34 Euros to 80 Euros.