“A tremendous orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra (BFO) has the most distinctive sound of any symphonic group … a sound that glows yellow-orange like the sun” (New York Classical Review). Tonight’s concert opens in unforgettable fashion with Arvo Pärt’s Summa, as the orchestra joins the worldwide celebration of Pärt at 90. Violin virtuoso Maxim Vengerov performs Sibelius’s sole, intensely demanding concerto as soloist. The program concludes with Brahms’s Symphony No. 2, which the ensemble imbues with “intense freshness and lyricism” (The Guardian) under its visionary founder Iván Fischer, who “touches the emotional core of the Second Symphony with complete sympathy and clarity of purpose” (AllMusic).