Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The West has much to learn from Hungarian culture

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

Ivan Fischer conducting the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Credit: Marco Borggreve

In central Budapest a crew from Hungary’s state TV is filming the unveiling of a new street sign. In honour 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 Centre, dedicated to a clutch of bracing new works, was being filmed for transmission prime time on the Hungarian equivalent of BBC1.

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