Budapest Festival Orchestra

A Hungarian guest at the Festspielhaus: in the final movement of Brahms's Second Piano Concerto, we suddenly hear the melodies of the Sinti and Roma musicians. Throughout his life the composer paid homage to the music of Hungary, and so it was natural for Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra to preface the work with two of the master’s Hungarian Dances. Yefim Bronfman is a gentleman among pianists, a world-class musician who specialized in the virtuosic repertoire at an early age and still masters it. Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, an agonizing test of the pianist’s fitness, has been one of Bronfman's showpieces for decades.