Unique Budapest Festival to Dazzle Audiences Throughout the Month

Next Saturday, January 11, the Transparent Sound New Music Festival will kick off with over twenty programs under a collective theme, with the title “Polychrome,” for almost a month in several Budapest venues, the organizers announced.

This year, programs will take place at the Budapest Music Center, the Liszt Academy, the House of Music Hungary, Trafo, Fuga, Nádor Hall, Műcsarnok, OMA and, as a new venue, ISON. The festival opens on January 11 at the Liszt Academy with a music-theater performance by the Dutch Ensemble Trapeze, in which composer Georgi Stoyanov will use Prokofiev’s works and correspondence to trace ‘a lost ballet.’

The festival will feature well-known European ensembles.

The Luxembourg-German Kollektiv Unruhe will perform at the Nádor Hall on January 17, while the Austrian NAMES, the New Art and Music Ensemble Salzburg, will perform at the Trafo on January 18. On January 28, the BMC Opus Jazz Club will host The Tunnel concert with Romanian musician Emil Gherasim “Fluidian”, Tibor Szemző and László Gőz.

The House of Music Hungary will host a joint concert by the German trumpet ensemble The Monochrome Project and the Hungarian percussion trio Trio Dakoda on January 30, following the curatorial and compositional work of Márton Illés. Fuga will host a concert by EnsembleSpectrum from Slovakia on January 31.

The festival will also host the premiere of Submersus, a work for piano by Judit Varga, a Hungarian composer based in Vienna, on February 1 at the BMC Hungarian Music Information Center and Library. The same venue will also host the Metaxu co-artistic production on January 16, with music by Andrea Szigetvári’s ensemble.

The festival events will be accompanied by interactive activities, too. Zsófia Remes will lead a composition course for children at ISON on January 26, while curator Marcell Dargay’s film club “Transparent Sound” will be held three times at the BMC Hungarian Music Information Center and Library on January 13, 20 and 27.

The new gallery of the OMA (Open Music Archive) will also open as part of the festival.

The first Transparent Sound New Music Festival was launched by Hungarian composers Balázs Horváth and Samu Gryllus in January 2014. Its primary aim was to present the most innovative musical trends of our time across the broadest possible spectrum, where audiences can participate in interactive demonstrations before or during concerts, thus helping them to understand new compositional ideas.

Via MTI, Featured image: Pixabay