Budapest Festival Orchestra

Paris, turn of the century, or as the French call it: La Belle Époque. The entire world is fixated on France, everyone wants to travel to Paris. Europe’s first car race, world expo, motion picture, Picasso, Renoir, Monet and perhaps the greatest flowering of French music. The capital of France represents all this at the same time. Romantic, Impressionist, Expressionist, Avant-garde artists live and work alongside each other, visit salons, drink in coffee houses and consciously set their own aesthetics against those of the Germans. Although Debussy and Ravel come to most people’s minds on hearing of this age, it would be difficult to comprehensively list all the talented composers of the day. Former and current students of the Liszt Academy are determined to whisk their audience off to La Belle Époque: by deconstructing the boundaries of space and time, they compress several decades of French music into a single day in order to evoke the kaleidoscopic diversity of the golden age of Paris at its height.