Budapest Spring Festival 2019
Posted by Budnews · Mar 15, 2019

Concerts, theatrical acts, exhibitions and several other programs will take place in multiple locations of the city.

Budapest Spring Festival is one of the city’s and Hungary’s most significant cultural event. This more than two-week long festival offers everything you might wish for: classical music, opera, jazz and folk music, world music, crossover, dance and theatre performances. During this period, Budapest becomes the cultural center of Europe for the 39th time. The festival has different themes in every year: this year’s focus is on Russia and creations of Russian culture - classics, contemporaries and living legends.

There will be dozens of venues in 2019: in addition to the Müpa Budapest and Liszt Academy, Uránia National Film Theatre, Pesti Vigadó and Várkert Bazár (Castle Garden Bazaar), Budapest Music Center, Akvárium Klub, A38 Ship and other Budapest theatres, cultural institutes and museums will also be home to outstanding events. It would be hard to choose among the programs, but we collected 5 programs, we think no one should miss:

Jordi Savall and the Hespèrion XXI, the ensemble he founded, want to allow their audience to experience relations, interactions, and cultural symbioses that may also bring us closer to the solution of a number of contemporary problems. For Savall, regions, periods, and styles never had clear-cut boundaries, and he has always considered the Mediterranean as an organically coherent cultural complex with a colorful spectrum of languages and religious relations.

On David Lynch’s Highway: Eraserhead. David Lynch is one of the most original contemporary film directors. His untameable imagination, special outlook, and distinctive humour have amalgamated into an unmistakable style. Apropos of the Budapest Photo Festival’s exhibition, David Lynch: Small Stories, the Budapest Spring Festival salutes the director’s unique cinematic universe with a series of screenings that presents four of his films, some of them rarely shown, the others recently digitally remastered. We chose Eraserhead from1977, that was Lynch’s first feature film. It already featured such signature characteristics of the oeuvre as surrealistic visions, a strong visuality, a dark tone, and a peculiar humour.

Triumph of the Body. Michelangelo and Sixteenth-Century Italian Draughtsmanship. Drawing played a central role in the art of Michelangelo, who left behind a unique œuvre not only as a sculptor, but also as a painter and architect. More than 700 of his drawings have survived, while his art focused almost exclusively on the representation of the human body. The Budapest exhibition presents thirty of his nude studies, borrowed from the world’s most prestigious collections, like the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the British Museum in London, the Casa Buonarroti and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Joseph Calleja Sings Arias: Maltese star tenor Joseph Calleja has been one of the most sought-after opera singers of the new century. He feels particularly at home in the Italian Romantic repertoire, and is often considered an heir of Pavarotti, or even of Jussi Björling, Beniamino Gigli, or Enrico Caruso. This season saw him in a new role, that of Rodolfo in Verdi’s Luisa Miller. He also sings a major role long on his repertoire, Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca, now in a production of the New York Metropolitan Opera, which will also tour the Aix-en-Provence Festival. The conductor of Calleja’s Budapest aria concert will be Pier Giorgio Morandi, globe-trotting specialist of Romantic Italian operas.

Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra and the Prague Philharmonic Choir: Founded in 1930 as the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, the group is the oldest of Russia’s symphonic ensembles, and also one of the best-known in the international concert arena. Its leaders have included such eminent conductors as Nikolai Golovanov, Aleksandr Gauk, and Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and they have cooperated with some of the world’s best soloists – including Pavarotti, Richter, and Kremer. Dmitri Shostakovich described the orchestra as “an outstanding ensemble of outstanding musicians,” referring to the fact that each member is also a distinguished solo and chamber performer.

For the full program list check out their official website, and save the date: April 5-22, Budapest!

  • 2019
  • budapest
  • festival
  • spring
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