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[last tickets] Budapest Festival Orchestra & Iván Fischer

Compassion

21.03.2024 — 19:30
Bozar, Henry Le Boeuf Hall
last tickets

Budapest Festival Orchestra

Iván Fischermusical direction 

Anna Lena Elbert soprano 

Olivia Vermeulenmezzo 

Nicholas Mulroy tenor 

Hanno Müller-Brachmann - bass-baritone 

Taiseer Elias oud 

Daniel Bardviolin solo 

Roopa Panesarsitar 

Cantemus Mixed Voice Choir - choir

Equinox children’s chorus 

Zeno Popescu musical direction Equinox 

 

 

Coproduction

Klarafestival, Bozar

 

18:45 Interview with Iván Fischer by Jan Van den Bossche (EN)

Bozar, Henry Le Boeuf Hall

With his Budapest Festival Orchestra, conductor Iván Fischer has made an exceptional journey over the past four decades. Not only is the orchestra today the youngest in the global top ten; it also owes this achievement to an unfailing stream of innovative projects in which music and humanity resonate. Compassion will be a new passion story for our time.

According to Fischer, the Passion of Christ is all about humanity: by witnessing Jesus’s suffering, you experience a feeling of commiseration. The conductor gives a universal interpretation to this exercise in empathy, by confronting Bach's St Matthew Passion with music by oppressed minorities. A few months before the concert, the additional artists and works will be chosen, taking into account the political context of the moment. Or: how a baroque masterpiece can still make us think, empathise and feel, three centuries later.

 

Programme

 

COMPASSION: Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and other passions

 

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) 

Excerpts from Matthäus-Passion, BWV 244, interlaced with the following compositions:

 

Tigran Mansurian (1939)

‘Agnus Dei’ from Requiem 


Taiseer Elias (oud) 

Improvisation


Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

Kaddish for violin solo


Roopa Panesar (sitar)
Improvisation


Taiseer Elias (oud) & Zohard Fresco (fame drum) 

Improvisation


Iván Fischer (1951)

Sait gezunt for children's chorus (Equinox) 

‘Watching the BFO is like glimpsing chamber-music-making on a big scale. And in Fischer they have not a dominant ego, but a facilitator of remarkable sensitivity.’
Gramophone

image © Marco Borggreve