In a piece written for the British publication The Spectator, Igor Toronyi-Lalic writes that the high-minded riches of Magyar musical life will be hard to avoid in Britain this year – let's hope some of the wisdom it offers rubs off on us.
Toronyi-Lalic writes that in central Budapest a crew from Hungary’s state TV is filming the unveiling of a new street sign. In honor of his centenary year composer Gyorgy Ligeti now has a road named after him. Contemporary classical music is deemed newsworthy in Hungary. Even more astonishingly – and anyone working in British classical music might want to sit down at this point – the ‘Ligeti 100’ concert at the Budapest Music Center, dedicated to a clutch of bracing new works, was being filmed for transmission prime time on the Hungarian equivalent of BBC1. Here, we’d be lucky if it got a midnight slot on Radio 3.
If much of the West’s cultural output today is marked by an intense sense of embarrassment that it should even exist as art – let alone say anything as art – the Hungarians couldn’t be prouder of their hefty, uncompromising contributions to high culture. This year a small army of them will arrive on these shores to remind us how it’s done.
Click here to read the full piece.