After enjoying five years of spectacular artistic achievement and more than 100,000 visitors under the leadership of artistic director Katalin Kokas, the International Chamber Music Festival of Kaposvár called Kapofest has taken a bold step to proceed for the next three years under the new leadership of two of Hungary's brightest young virtuosos, violinist Kristóf Baráti and cellist István Várdai.
Scheduled for August 13-19, the concerts in this idyllic city of 70,000 in southwestern Hungary, sweetly reminiscent of an Ernst Lubitsch comedy, the highly attractive, mainstream classical music programing this year will feature shorter works and more Hungarian musicians who, as before under Kovacs, when there were more musicians from outside the country's borders, will be of the very highest international caliber. 
In addition to the concerts, the Festival's guest artists will be teaching master classes; there will also be art and photography exhibitions.
To top off matters, Hungary's leading classical music radio host Ádám Bősze is returning to introduce each concert with his cosmopolitan, multi-lingual blend of sophistication and humor. In the spirit of Lubitsch's iconic 1940 film, The Shop Around the Corner, Bősze's music store in Budapest is almost an exact equiavalent of the Matuschek and Company store in a fictional, prewar Budapest where Klara (Margaret Sullavan) and Alfred (James Stewart) met, sparred and fell in love.
As one of the world's best chamber music festivals, there will be once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to hear musicians like the great cellist Miklos Perenyi, the clarinetist Andreas Ottensamer, principal in the Berlin Philharmonic, the young Polish Apollon Musagète String Quartet, and the concert master of the Ferenc Erkel Chamber Orchestra, which will be celebrating its 30th anniversary at the Festival, in venues and surroundings that are guaranteed to kindle romance.
When I asked György Bolyki, whose Brothers Music Production Company manages Kaposfest as well as the Erkel Chamber Orchestra, about the business of chamber music festivals these days, Bolyki said that Kaposfest remains as a high priority, national cultural event: "Considering that the income from ticket sales and sponsorships would not be enough for funding," he told me, "the cultural branch of the Ministry of National Resources and the city of Kaposvár also provide a great amount of financial support."
Given the high level of music making and the nostalgic, Central European surroundings, it's natural to paraphrase Felix Bressart's unforgettable line as Alfred's co-worker Pirovitch in The Shop Around the Corner: If you like Lubitsch's Budapest, you're going to love Kaposfest.