The oeuvre of Hungarian composer-pianist Franz Liszt and Italian culture will be in focus at this year’s Budapest Spring Festival between April 10 and 26, the organisers have said.

The country’s largest cultural festival will feature in a cross-over production Italian visual director Paolo Micciche’s show DanteXperience on April 24 in the Palace of Arts, combining Liszt’s monumental Dante Symphony with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a cornerstone of European culture. Italian culture is in the festival’s focus on the occasion that Dante was born 750 years ago. Related programmes include a performance by renowned baritone Leo Nucci reciting Verdi’s most popular arias. His contemporary, cellist phenomenon Mario Brunello will perform works by Haydn. Hungary’s Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra will perform Italian composer Nino Rota’s piece for cello. Naples’ Teatro di San Carlo, the world’s oldest opera house, will show Verdi’s three-act opera Luisa Miller with Elena Mosuc in the title role. The festival this year will feature in other programmes international starts such as Russian pianist-conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy and Irish singer Sinead O’Connor along with top Hungarian performers such as pianist Dezső Ránki and saxophone player Mihály Dresch.

The festival, which is to be held for the 35th time this year, has become Central Europe’s largest comprehensive premium art festival thanks to structural reforms carried out in the past year, Csaba Káel, head of the festival’s operative organisational body and CEO of Budapest’s Palace of Arts, said. The festival’s timing this year will mean that visitors to Budapest will be able to enjoy better weather and the festival will link better to similar events in Vienna and Prague.

The two-week event will offer 170 programmes featuring classical, jazz and world music, theatre, dance and exhibition events.

via hungarymatters.hu and metropol.hu

photo: gobudapest.com