4 Best Performing Arts in Budapest, Hungary

World-renowned conductor Iván Fischer, who is still music director, formed the group with famed Hungarian conductor Zoltán Kocsis in 1983. The orchestra has won international accolades and is hands-down your best bet for classical music in Budapest. International soloists and conductors are often invited to perform with the orchestra. Its home base was previously Liszt Ferenc Music Academy, but since 2005 the orchestra has also performed regularly at the new Béla Bartók National Concert Hall in the Művészetek Palotája (Palace of the Arts), and they have monthly Sunday Chamber Music concerts in their rehearsal hall on this side of the river, in Buda.Tickets can be purchased online or at several locations around Budapest, including Ticket Express and the Liszt Ferenc Academy.

This magnificent art nouveau music academy presides over the cafés and gardens of Liszt Ferenc tér. Along with the Vigadó, it's one of the city's main concert halls, hosting orchestra and chamber music concerts in its splendid main hall. On summer days the sound of daytime rehearsals from inside adds to the sweetness in the air along the pedestrian oasis of café society, just off buzzing Andrássy út.

The academy itself has two auditoriums: a green-and-gold 1,200-seat main hall and a smaller hall for chamber music and solo recitals. Farther along the square is a dramatic statue of Liszt Ferenc (Franz Liszt) himself, hair blown back from his brow, seemingly in a flight of inspiration. Pianist Ernő (Ernst) Dohnányi and composers Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály were teachers here.

You can purchase tickets to all performances and classical music concerts held at the academy through the ticket office. It's sometimes even possible to grab a standing-room ticket just before a performance.

Miklós Ybl's crowning achievement, built between 1875 and 1884, is the glittering neo-Renaissance opera house. It's Budapest's main venue for opera and classical ballet, and it also presents an international repertoire of classical and modern works as well as such Hungarian favorites as Kodály's Háry János. Badly damaged during the siege of 1944–45, it was restored for its 1984 centenary.

Two buxom marble sphinxes guard the driveway; the main entrance is flanked by Alajos Strobl's "romantic-realist" limestone statues of Liszt and of another 19th-century Hungarian composer, Ferenc Erkel, the father of Hungarian opera (his patriotic opera Bánk bán is still performed for national celebrations).

Inside, the spectacle begins even before the performance does. You glide up grand staircases and through wood-paneled corridors and gilt lime-green salons into a glittering jewel box of an auditorium. Its four tiers of boxes are held up by helmeted sphinxes beneath a frescoed ceiling by Károly Lotz. Lower down there are frescoes everywhere, with intertwined motifs of Apollo and Dionysus. In its early years the Budapest Opera was conducted by Gustav Mahler (1888–91), and after World War II by Otto Klemperer (1947–50).

You can't view the interior on your own, but 45-minute tours in English are usually conducted daily; buy tickets in the Opera Sales Sentre (Opera Értékesítési Centrum) near the Hajós utca entrance. (Large groups should call in advance.)

Of course, the best way to experience the Opera House is to see a ballet or opera. The main season runs from September to mid-June, and includes about 50 major productions, including about five new opera premieres a year. Tickets, which are available online as well as at the box office, are relatively affordable and easy acquire.

Except during the two-week international opera and ballet festival in mid-August, the Opera House is closed in summer. That said, the National Opera Company sometimes performs at various outdoor stages and festivals during the off-season, and can be heard almost nightly on several local classical radio stations.

In southern Pest, at the foot of Rákóczy (aka Lágymányosi) Bridge, right beside the similarly grand National Theater, this monumental (750,000-square-foot) venue known as Műpa is where the capital's entertainment fans feast on a wide array of musical, theatrical, and dance performances in addition to fine dining. On the outside the Palace of Arts does indeed look palatial, in a very modern sense. The inside, as spacious and as sparkling as it is, contains plenty of intimate, well-cushioned little nooks on all floors on both sides of its Béla Bartók National Concert Hall—which occupies its center and has world-class acoustics—where you can take a seat and ponder life and/or art.