Budapest Festival Orchestra
Iván Fischer, co-founder and Music Director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, has been responsible for creating a vibrant orchestra with an enviable international touring profile which appears at all the major venues and festivals of the world.
The orchestra has made numerous award-winning cds with Philips and has recently recorded Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Mahler’s Sixth, Second and Fourth Symphonies as part of an exclusive recording contract with Channel Classics.
As a guest conductor Fischer works with the finest symphony orchestras of the world. He has been invited to the Berlin Philharmonic more than ten times, he leads every year two weeks of programs with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra where his last, highly acclaimed project was in March 2008 Bach's Saint Matthew Passion. Besides his contract with the nso of Washington, he works regularly with leading us symphony orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra.
He has developed and introduced new types of concerts, ‘cocoa-concerts’ for young children, ‘surprise’ concerts where the programme is not announced, ‘one forint concerts’ where he talks to the audience, open-air concerts in Budapest attracting tens of thousands of people, as well as concert opera performances applying scenic elements. He has founded several festivals, including a summer festival in Budapest on baroque music and the Budapest Mahlerfest which is also a forum for commissioning and presenting new music works.
