Budapest Festival Orchestra launches Quarantine Soirees

As concert halls continue to close due to Coronavirus, live streaming of performances will provide welcome access for music lovers worldwide. In Hungary, the innovative composer and conductor, Maestro Ivan Fischer, has created a brilliant new concert series in response to this worldwide musical shutdown. The Maestro and his Budapest Festival Orchestra launched “Quarantine Soirees” on 16 March 2020 and the chamber music concerts will continue nightly online at 7:45 pm (Central European time). The chamber concerts are broadcast live and free to view online while COVID-19 forces music lovers to stay at home, reports Forbes.

It is no surprise that these special concerts were the idea of Maestro Fischer as he is well-known for bringing his music to audiences that are often excluded.  Every season, he and the orchestra organise two Community Weeks during which the orchestra’s chamber ensembles play in nursing homes, child-care institutions, schools, prisons, churches, and synagogues. And for the past five years, he and his orchestra have organised the extremely popular annual Dancing on the Square, where hundreds of children from underprivileged areas of Hungary dance together at a free, open-air event.

Last June, they danced to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which Fischer says “was considered the music of freedom, especially because of the continuous, uplifting pulsation of the last movement.” The Maestro says that while we are at home during this difficult time, we “need music, especially chamber music because this is not the time for orchestra music concerts”. Every evening, members of the Budapest Festival Orchestra will give a concert from their rehearsal studio.