Musical spring blooms despite moody Budapest

By Michael Roddy

BUDAPEST, March 19 (Reuters Life!) - The Budapest Spring Festival landed legendary violinist Nigel Kennedy at the last minute after Maxim Vengerov cancelled, but organizers have been unable to do anything about Hungary's angry political mood.

So from next year the 28-year-old annual festival of music, dance and art, founded in communist times to promote tourism, will start a week later to avoid the March 15 National Day.

This year, as in previous recent years, right wing demonstrators glared at their left wing rivals across police barricades and the day was dubbed the "holiday-less holiday".

"You know this is a great problem for us because...we don't like political movements in our program," festival director Zsofia Zimanyi told Reuters. "So from next year we will begin the festival always after the 15th of March -- we will begin on the 20th of March."

Not that foreign visitors who make up 30 percent of the 17-day festival's audience, and account for a large part of the 3 billion forints ($18 million) in tourist revenues, were seriously inconvenienced by the standoff in the streets.

At one of the weekend concerts, the only person who seemed troubled was an orchestra official walking the lobby muttering: "The streets are closed and half the audience is not here."

The hall was full a short time later though, for a glorious performance of the Brahms Double Concerto for violin and cello by Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos and Hungarian cellist Miklos Perenyi with the top-notch Budapest Festival Orchestra under the baton of Pinchas Steinberg.

The audience, in time-honored Hungarian tradition, clapped rhythmically and insistently afterwards for so long and with such enthusiasm that they were rewarded with a rare encore of the third movement.