Uplifting music playing in cars around Budapest

Over the past week, Attila Kovács has been playing music to entertain the residents of Budapest, just as he has done for more than three decades as a viola player in the city’s MAV symphony orchestra reports The Guardian. Many orchestras and opera houses have taken to streaming archive performances online, but the MAV Orchestra has drawn on its unique, itinerant history to take things a step further.

These days, however, the orchestra’s “performances” look slightly different from usual. Hungary, like almost every other country in Europe, has banned large gatherings of people because of the coronavirus crisis, making live concerts impossible.

The reaction over the past week has been almost universally positive, said Kálmán Kovács, a trumpeter in the orchestra who has been driving one of the cars. An elderly woman conducted from her balcony, a trio of young foreigners danced “as though they were in a nightclub” to a Strauss waltz, and a truck driver wound down his window and asked for the volume to be increased as cyclists stopped to listen.

Every day, musicians from the orchestra drive two cars mounted with loudspeakers around Budapest and its surroundings, belting out recordings of past performances. It is currently forbidden to leave the house except for essential activities in Hungary, but the idea is that people should open up their windows or step on to their balconies and enjoy an uplifting blast of classical music.

“It seems like we managed to make many generations very happy with playing music, even in these weird, stressful times,” said Kovács, who noted that while pensioners formed the majority of the audience, in recent days young people too had been enjoying the music.

“People came out to the streets, keeping the proper distance between each other, and started to clap and give us a thumbs up. Some of them were even dancing,” he said.

The music selection changes daily but is always drawn from recordings of the orchestra, and there is an emphasis on light and uplifting music. “We’re not going to be playing the Shostakovich Leningrad Symphony,” joked György Lendvai, the orchestra’s managing director. If people want to request an appearance near their homes, they can message the orchestra’s Facebook account with their address.