Hey, June!
4-7 June 2021
One of Müpa Budapest's most consistent traditional ways to open the summer is the Hey, June! event series, and in the unusual year of 2021 it will open the festival season in a suitably unusual fashion, with live concerts taking place in an online space. This greeting of the season will also be taking place now, just like the one-off productions that cannot be seen anywhere else, which we can enjoy at home, seated in our armchairs.
The exact schedule for this year's series, one of the highlights of each June ever since the institution opened in 2005, is shown below. Zoli Beck, the front man of 30Y, one of the most popular alternative rock bands in Hungary, will be taking the stage with a confessional dramatic piece: the performance THE GENERATIONLESS MAN is a musical solo act studded with short monologues and scenes that has been taking shape since 2019 and which is being retired with this final performance. Twenty-one songs and two thousand words about the illusory nature of the unknowable world played over the course of a single act lasting for an hour and forty minutes. Dóri Hegyi came out with an innovative debut art-pop full-length album – about the seven stations of love – with her total art project OHNODY in 2020, which was quickly followed in 2021 with another concept work dealing part with the limitations of verbal communications. Rounding out this concert aligned visually to the world of OHNODY as it travels a dramaturgical arc drawn from songs from the two LPs and backed by a live band will be the choreography of dance artist Bettina Jurák. Perhaps the most multi-culti band in Hungary, the Norwegian-Irish-Hungary trio Mongooz And The Magnet have, over the past year, expanded into a quartet, written a great many songs and conceived of a show in which their modern blues-soul-funk-rock sound, the tracks from their most recent album, people═people, and their new compositions are heard with a completely new approach for them. In the course of their acoustic performance, they will be recreating their songs mixed with synthetic sounds alongside a number of guest musicians. Successful both internationally and at home in Hungary over the past decade, Middlemist Red came out with their third album in 2020: The Other Side Of Nowhere features synth and psychedelic rock enriched with more pronounced electronic and folk music influences. These songs following the narrative of an imaginary Western film and with a wide-screen sound really achieve their greatest fullness when performed live, played in conjunction with The Wild Bunch Orchestra, an ensemble put together for this occasion under the leadership of Márton Erős, a true marksman when it comes to symphonic arrangements.
