Egeszegedre!
Been here, seen this...at last. I've been wanting to go to Budapest
for decades. Friends who studied there would return with tales of
stylistic expertise, pedagogical inspiration, extraordinary
traditions, cheap music, cheaper opera tickets and excessively good
cakes. Violinist friends flocked to Hungarian-born teachers living
abroad (here or Canada); the great 19th-century violinists and the
traditions they left behind sprang almost wholly from Hungary,
including Josef Joachim and Leopold Auer and later Jelly d'Aranyi, who
was Joachim's great-niece. As for Gypsy fiddling traditions, have you
ever seen anything quite as astonishing as Roby Lakatos?
Now the place is an extraordinary melting pot of old and new,
19th-century Art Nouveau grandeur alongside communist-era concrete
heaps, bullet-scarred, soot-covered buildings in downtown Pest
contrasting with sleek, renovated, olde-worlde central Europe for
tourists - but exquisite nonetheless - in Buda. Cranes everywhere.
This is a city on the up, enchanting, atmospheric, disturbing, magical
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