Fugato Orchestra
As Hungary’s leading hybrid music ensemble, Fugato Orchestra creates unity out of diversity. The music of this chamber symphonic group, with its electronics, drums, bass guitar and vocals, is a novel fusion of the essential energies of its constituent genres.
Artistic and lightsome at the same time; both respectful of tradition and innovative; polished and yet spontaneous; profound yet playful; intelligent and passionate: hybrid music is all of these. And this is Fugato Orchestra.
The pieces, unifying the main energies of genres, like the refinement of classical music, the power of rock, the freedom of jazz, and the flavour of world music, are composed by Balázs Alpár, leader and keyboardist of the 13-membered orchestra. The majority of the members attended the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest.
Fugato’s first album „Neander Variations” was published in 2004 and it received outstanding international reviews. The Orchestra is now known in Germany, France, Italy, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom, The USA, Brazil, Mexico, and Japan. In 2007 the Orchestra placed 9th from over 1000 international bands at Europe’s largest talent contest, the Austrian Band Contest in Vienna and also won the Hungarian Live Award. They were the winner of the audience prize in 3 consecutive years at the Budapest Fringe Festival.
Their third album, Hybrid Harmonies was released in 2017.
Press:
“Fugato’s music is surely valuable: elegant, animated, light, flowing, symphonic, even if it suffers somehow for the boundaries imposed by the techniques of composition enacted by Alpár which make the compositions appear almost like a style exercise’‘. -Arlequins (IT)
”It would be great to see this band at a festival on this side of the Atlantic…” – Kinesis (USA)