Winter Festival

Since The Snow Queen was premiered in 2015, the ballet ensemble of the National Opera of Ukraine in Kiev has repeatedly presented the work in Ukraine and abroad, in recent years increasingly as a sign of resistance and self-empowerment. Despite the difficult living and working conditions, the company pursues their artistic passion and works on maintaining something like a day-to-day life, in this way acting as a perfect ambassador for their home country. 

Iván Fischer travelled all the way to Sicily, to an ancient theater, to work on his "third way": a new, self-conceived unity of sound and directing that brings together experiences from staged and concert performances, taking them to a new level. Here, the ear shows the body the way – just like in Mozart's score, which always integrates physical movement with emotions. 

"Our native language is the music of the Habsburg monarchy," says Iván Fischer about his Budapest Festival Orchestra, who will join the artist in devoting themselves to a thoroughly bourgeois Protestant from Germany: Johann Sebastian Bach. Of course, Bach is a musical universalist. And music of any kind only comes to life when different traditions meet in it.