Commentary
Democratic Security
Friends on Ukraine’s Terms? Hungary Drops Its Veto
10 June 2026
10 June 2026
What can a concert reveal about two ways of imagining ‘Asia’? A single concert in Budapest, where a Taiwanese conductor leads a Hungarian choir through the endangered tongues of Asia, shows what a state owes the peoples who carry those languages and why CEE should recognise the stakes.
On a spring evening at the Budapest Music Center, I had the opportunity to listen to the Kodály Choir of Debrecen perform a programme titled ‘The Far East Is Near’, led by the Taiwanese conductor Ms. SzuYun Swing Hsieh, herself trained here in Budapest, a small bridge between two places that rarely appear in the same sentence.
By the end of the evening, I had stopped thinking of it as a musical concert and started thinking of it as an argument communicated through music.