“The internationally celebrated Budapest Festival Orchestra staged a musical demonstration in downtown Budapest on Saturday to protest against the Municipal Assembly’s decision to reduce funding for the ensemble,” reads an unsigned Sunday (5/8) article in the Daily News Budapest (Hungary). Budapest Festival Orchestra Music Director Iván Fischer “told a crowd that filled Vörösmarty Square, … ‘We want a Budapest that has more music, more happiness, more love and less hate.’ He spoke out for minority groups and said the orchestra wants them to feel just as safe as anyone else in Budapest, in a friendly environment filled with music. As a message to the Municipal Assembly, German Bass-Baritone Hanno Mueller-Brachmann and the orchestra performed the aria from Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ in which Sarastro says that revenge has no place in his domain [‘In diesen heil’gen Hallen’]…. At the end of April, the assembly voted to cut funding for the orchestra by 200 million forints (EUR 940,000) to 60 million. Fischer vowed that the orchestra would … continue to perform. At the end of the demonstration, members of the crowd joined the orchestra with their own instruments in performing a Beethoven composition.”
Posted May 9, 2016
