With his Budapest Festival Orchestra, conductor Iván Fischer has made an exceptional journey over the past four decades. Not only is the orchestra today the youngest in the global top ten; it also owes this achievement to an unfailing stream of innovative projects in which music and humanity resonate. Compassion will be a new passion story for our time.
According to Fischer, the Passion of Christ is all about humanity: by witnessing Jesus’s suffering, you experience a feeling of commiseration. The conductor gives a universal interpretation to this exercise in empathy, by confronting Bach's St Matthew Passion with music by oppressed minorities. A few months before the concert, the additional artists and works will be chosen, taking into account the political context of the moment. Or: how a baroque masterpiece can still make us think, empathise and feel, three centuries later.