Budapest Festival Orchestra, Ivan Fischer

Béla Bartók: Hungarian Peasant Songs, Sz.100 for orchestra
interspersed with unaccompanied traditional songs
Interval
Béla Bartók: Duke Bluebeard's Castle - opera in 1 act
(concert performance in Hungarian with English surtitles)

The Budapest Festival Orchestra presents Bartók’s dark and disquieting opera, steeped in Hungarian folk tradition.

The combination of this ‘ultra-charismatic’ orchestra and music director Iván Fischer has been described by The Guardian as ‘intoxicating’.

Bartók had a lifetime devotion to folk music and hoped that his Hungarian Peasant Songs, based on authentic Hungarian melodies and orchestrated in 1933, would open up these pretty folk melodies to a wider audience.

Written in Budapest, Bartók’s single opera is a bloodthirsty fairytale with strong psychological and erotic undertones. Featuring just two characters, it’s arresting performed in concert.