Budapest Festival Orchester


SYMPHONY ORCHESTRAS PERIOD INSTRUMENT ENS. CHAMBER ORCHESTRAS CHOIRS CHAMBER MUSIC ENS. CONTEMPORARY MUSIC ENS. Bamberger Symphoniker BBC Symphony Orchestra Budapest Festival Orchester Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin NDR Sinfonieorchester Orchestra Nazionale della RAI Torino Orchestre National de France Orquestra Gulbenkian Lisboa Philharmonia Orchestra Prager Symphoniker (FOK) hr-Sinfonieorchester (Frankfurt) Israel Philharmonic Orchestra Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart Radio-Sinfonieorchester Wien (ORF) Royal Philharmonic Orchestra London Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken Russian National Orchestra Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden Sinfonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks SWR-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg WDR-Sinfonieorchester (Köln) Wiener Philharmoniker Wiener Symphoniker	SYMPHONY ORCHESTRAS
	Budapest Festival Orchestra

	The orchestra was formed in 1983 by Iván Fischer and Zoltán Kocsis, with musicians "drawn from the cream of Hungary's younger players," as "TheTimes" of London put it. Their aim, through intensive rehearsals and demanding the highest standards from musicians, was to make the orchestra's initially three or four concerts per year significant events in Hungary's musical life, and to give Budapest a new symphony orchestra of international standing. Between 1992 and 2000, extending their work to a full season the ensemble operated under the aegis of the Budapest Municipality and the new BFO Foundation, formed by fifteen Hungarian and multinational corporations and banks. From the 2000/2001 season onwards the orchestra is operated by the BFO Foundation, which the Budapest City Council regularly supports under a contract renewable every five years. The Festival Orchestra is nowadays not only a vital part of Budapest's music life (usually performing to capacity audiences) but also a frequent and much appreciated guest at the world's most important centres of musical excellence: Salzburg (Summer Festival), Vienna (Musikverein, Konzerthaus), Lucerne (Festival), Montreux, Zürich (Tonhalle), New York (Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall), among others. After having recorded on Hungaroton, Quintana, Teldec, Decca, Ponty and Berlin Classics, the orchestra signed an exclusive recording contract with Philips Classics in 1996. Its recording of Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin received the Gramophone Award, while Diapason and Le Monde de la Musique chose it as their recording of the year. Recordings of Liszt's Faust Symphony and Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra were chosen among the year's five best orchestral discs by Gramophone. Numerous outstanding figures from the international music scene have performed with the orchestra: Sir Georg Solti (who was the orchestra's honorary guest conductor until his death), Yehudi Menuhin, Kurt Sanderling, Eliahu Inbal, Charles Dutoit, Gidon Kremer, Sándor Végh, András Schiff, Heinz Holliger, Agnes Baltsa, Ida Haendel, Martha Argerich, Hildegard Behrens, Yuri Bashmet, Rudolf Barshai, Kiri te Kanawa, Radu Lupu, Thomas Zehetmair, Richard Goode and others. Among the orchestra's more important projects, its opera productions have been widely acclaimed: The Magic Flute (Budapest), Cosi fan tutte (Athens), Idomeneo (Budapest/Athens), Orfeo ed Euridice (Budapest/Brussesl), Un Turco in Italia (Paris), the cycle of works marking the 50th anniversary of Bartók's death (Budapest/Brussels/Cologne/Paris/New York), the cycle of Mahler symphonies over several years (Budapest/Lisbon/Frankfurt/Vienna), the series of performances for the centenary of Brahms' death and the Bartók-Stravinsky cycle (Edinburgh/London/San Francisco/New York).
	Representation: Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Italy, France, Germany Portugal* *) not exclusive