Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me Stephen Saka.

My guest today is one of the world's best known and best loved conductors

who professes to dislike 90% of what it means to be a maestro international conductor.

Ivan Fisher was born in Budapest some seven decades ago. His family was

Jewish and though his parents survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary, his grandparents were not so

lucky. His childhood was filled with music and by 25 he'd won one of the top international prizes for young conductors.

Since then, orchestral music has dominated his life, though he's always brought to it an

unconventional, playful spirit. He's performed in all of the great centres of classical music,

but his creative heart remains in Budapest, in the Budapest Festival

Orchestra, which he founded four decades ago and which he continues to lead. Not for him the

stuffiness and ritual that sometimes characterizes classical music. He encourages his musicians

to think of the orchestra as a lab, open to musical

experimentation, in terms of genre, presentation, and audience interaction. He's taken his ensemble to

schools, to prisons, and onto the streets. He writes music too and says he wishes he'd started

composing much earlier. His opera, the

Red Heifer, addressed anti-Semitism in 19th century Hungary. And there is today a tension between

his artistic and personal liberalism and the illiberal authoritarianism of Hungary's populist government, led by Victor Orban.

Aside from politics, there's also been the challenge to all cultural life posed by the COVID pandemic.

So in this current climate, how easy is it to find the magic in music making?

Well, Ivan Fisher joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk.

Lovely to be here. It's great to have you here. Let me ask you, how different has it been making music

in the time of COVID? COVID had positive and negative effects on our life. The problem was that there is no

...