The Budapest Festival Orchestra At Carnegie Hall

program

Bartok: Hungarian Peasant Songs

Bartok: Piano Concerto No. 2
Schubert: Impromptu in E-flat major, Op. 90, No. 2
Schubert: Hungarian Melody
Andras Schiff, piano

Schubert: Symphony No. 9

Bartok: The Swineherd’s Dance from ‘Hungarian Pictures’

Even in an age that glorifies multitasking, Iván Fischer is flattering impressive. Even in his tyro days, he wasn’t only a one-track guy. He complicated piano, violin, cello and conducting.

Straight Talk on Bartok

Conductor Ivan Fischer and pianist Andras Schiff plead a song with WQXR’s Jeff Spurgeon

Now he seems to have a low-pitched solar complement orbiting around him. His principal regard is heading a Budapest Festival Orchestra. Fischer founded a band scarcely 30 years ago, and it’s only one of a gifted Hungarian’s many low-pitched pursuits.

In further to his other positions — personality of a Konzerthaus Orchestra in Berlin, principal artist with a Orchestra of a Age of Enlightenment — there are dozens of guest conducting gigs with orchestras like a Berlin Philharmonic and a Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Then there are a festivals Fischer has founded, including a Budapest Mahlerfest (he also combined a Budapest Mahler Society) and a apart summer antique festival (he honed his early song chops as partner to Nicholas Harnoncourt). And there’s Fischer a composer, and Fischer a theatre director. At this year’s Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, he conducted and destined performances of Don Giovanni to considerable acclaim.

Fischer’s calendar contingency be some kind of meticulously structured spreadsheet, though that acerbity doesn’t lift over into his song making. In a examination of his Beethoven performances final year in New York, Times censor James Oestreich described Fischer as “a energetic conductor who manages to interpose a ostensible impetuosity even into a opening that was apparently rehearsed to within an in. of a life.”

That impetuosity was on arrangement again final night, as Fischer and a band done a stop during Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center to play a really same module slated for a Carnegie Hall webcast — a pairing of Schubert‘s desirous Symphony No. 9 with Bartok‘s hasty Piano Concerto No. 2. To these ears, it was nearby sonorous soundness — instinctive, uninformed performances joined with immaculately tweaked orchestral tone.

APM

That’s mostly due to Fischer’s penetrating clarity of how sound projects from a stage, and to that finish he played low-pitched chairs with a customary sonorous seating arrangement. Instead of violins and cellos decorated directly in front of him, he placed winds and brass. The double basses, customarily shunted distant off to one side, were perched on double-high risers mainly located in a behind — all a improved to hear a vibrated grumblings that open Schubert’s scherzo movement.

There is also in this module a frolicsome suggestion of a reunion, with Fischer welcoming his aged crony András Schiff as a soloist for a Bartok. Both musicians were innate in Budapest, attended propagandize together and available all 3 of Bartok’s piano concertos with a Budapest Festival Orchestra in their hometown 15 years ago.