august 28, 2012

Even before they played a note, there were hints that the Budapest Festival Orchestra does things differently. The double basses lined up in the choir stalls high above the orchestra, miles away from the rest of the strings. Music director Iván Fischer, who co-founded the orchestra in 1983, personally tuned each section from the podium, leading them through simple chords like a kindly schoolmaster.

The BFO began life as a festival band and still plays with staggering freshness and verve. Fischer's eccentricities are instantly vindicated by the sound he draws: the added height of the bass section gave the strings a gorgeous bottom-heaviness; the tuning trick made for absolute cohesion from the whole group. Their account of Mahler's Fifth Symphony was spacious and thrilling, sonorous and spontaneous, awesome in scale and packed with glittering detail. The first movement was nostalgic and unhurried, the second hot-blooded, the famous Adagietto beautifully still – the care with which Fischer placed each tender phrase, and the precision with which the strings responded, was breathtaking. For the Scherzo, he invited principal horn Zoltán Szoke to play from the front of the stage. Even though Szoke looked a tad awkward counting bars of rests in the spotlight, it was worth every one of them for the brazen impact of when he turned his bell into the audience. Fischer's inventiveness extends and enriches the already magnificent colours available from this orchestra. They opened their programme with Bartók's Hungarian Peasant Songs, played with full-bowed earthiness, and his First Violin Concerto.Barnabás Kelemen was the soloist: an impressive showman, but too premeditated in his technical and interpretative tricks. An encore – the Sarabande from Bach's D minor partita – was tediously over-gestured. Even during the concerto, the BFO was always the star.