Hamlet

The dice and the stopwatch will be coming out again at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall as it hosts another round of musical ‘battle’. When we talk about instrumental duels in the Hungarian capital these days, it is no longer necessarily Bach and Marchand, or even Liszt and Thalberg, that we are thinking of, because we have our own riveting concert series right here at Müpa Budapest.

Two masterpieces of late 19th-century French sacred music make up the programme of this concert-hall celebration: Gabriel Fauré’s exquisitely beautiful Requiem and the Clovis Mass by the elderly Charles Gounod. Between the movements of the latter work, the audience will also become acquainted with four further gems from the Gallican tradition of church music, with one composition each by Alexandre Guilmant, Louis Aubert, Camille Saint-Saëns and Théodore Dubois.

Hiperkarma frontman Róbert Bérczesi exploded onto the Hungarian alternative scene in the early ’00s, when his unique and sincere lyrics quickly made him a cult figure in the country’s music world. Although the group has disbanded and reformed more than once over the years, it has always retained its unique, lyrical and raw sound, one in which personal struggles and inner journeys play a central role.