Time Out calls the House of Music, designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, "the standout initiative" of the Liget Budapest project which aims to rehabilitate the capital's City Park and transform it into a museum island.Continue reading
Concerts, interactive exhibitions, creative spaces and music education activities await visitors at the House of Hungarian Music, László Baán, the government commissioner for Liget Budapest, said at the venue’s inauguration in Budapest’s City Park on Saturday.
Baán said that music is the best known branch of Hungarian art around the world, yet the country never had a showcase of its music history, until now.
The concept behind the venue, he said, involved making it “not only a permanent exhibition of music history, but a place for temporary shows and an extraordinary cathedral of sound where concerts as well as music education take place”.
Baán said Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto’s design, picked from more than a hundred applications by an international jury, was a “work of genius, precisely serving its desired function” and predicted that it would become “an iconic pearl of the capital”.
Visitors to the House of Hungarian Music can hear performances, free of charge, by students of the Academy of Music in the coming days, and an ever busier program of concerts, music-themed presentations, workshops and music education activities will follow.
The venue’s first temporary exhibition, of Hungarian popular music in the decades before the change of regime, will open in the autumn. Other temporary exhibitions on the calendar include international topics, such as the Rolling Stones.
Ticket sales for programs at the House of Hungarian Music launched two weeks earlier and “several thousand” have already been sold, Baán said.
In the featured photo, a section of the House of Hungarian Music on its opening day. Featured photo by Szilárd Koszticsák/MTI