Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra returned, after six years, to New York’s 2,800-seat Carnegie Hall, where they performed two sold-out concerts. On the first night, the orchestra opened the program as a choir singing a piece by Arvo Pärt before they were joined by virtuoso Grammy Award-winning violinist Maxim Vengerov for Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major. The second half of the concert featured Brahms’s Symphony No. 2, and then three musicians played some Hungarian folk music for an encore.

On the other three nights of the tour, the program was Mahler’s grandiose Symphony No. 3, lasting 110 minutes, with mezzosoprano Gerhild Romberger and local choirs at every stop. “Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra led an illuminating journey through one of Mahler’s less-heard symphonies at Carnegie Hall”, wrote the critic of The New York Times, who thought that although standout performances abounded (lauding concertmaster Daniel Bard, trombonist Balázs Szakszon, and Bence Horváth’s post horn solo), “in this symphony, the orchestra was the real star. Fischer and the ensemble were endurance athletes, if ones whose grace, panache and emotional commitment made each moment of the long journey enthralling.”

As the reviewer of the The Wall Street Journal put it, “The effect of BFO’s playing, technically of a high quality while also emotionally abandoned, was electric.” The journalist of Arts Journal wished New Yorkers could regularly encounter Iván Fischer, while an author of The New Criterion emphasized, among other things, that “the playing of the orchestra was exceptionally clear”, and that this was a very “human” Mahler performance.

As the title of the review in the National Today put it, Mahler's Enigmatic Third Symphony Shines in Illuminating Performance”. And, as the reviewer of Concertonet wrote: “Iván Fischer, turned the dark moon to glow, the winds to balm, and below-freezing air to a warm, even cordial summer night.” An author for Broadway World went even further writing “this performance did not merely impress — it recalibrated expectations. […] it was, in every respect, phenomenal — technically superb, intellectually coherent, and emotionally overwhelming.”

Following the back-to-back concerts in Carnegie Hall, the orchestra also performed for New York’s youngest audience: they bid farewell to the city with a Cocoa Concert at the DiMenna Center, organized by the Tulipán Foundation – and the impact was just as powerful there.

And then, in an unusual manner for their typically more reserved temperament, audiences at the Boston Symphony Hall expressed their gratitude for the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s performance with a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. According to the article in the Boston Classical Review, listening to Fischer and the BFO, makes one think that there is no better way to play this symphony. The reviewer also described how the orchestra “boasts a chemistry of the first rank, their camaraderie as evident in their phenomenally flexible playing as in their ready eye contact.” The Boston Globe hailed the performance as “illuminating”, which gave audiences “a renewed belief in the coming spring”.

The author of a review in a Toronto website entitled “An Absolute Joy”, who lauded every detail of the performance, summarized the experience as follows: “BFO once again lived up to their fame as one of the best orchestras in the world. It was their finesse and grace that illustrated what music really is.” In addition to the concert in Toronto, Iván Fischer taught a masterclass for the Royal Conservatory Orchestra.

The Budapest Festival Orchestra will be appearing at the Scala in Milan and the Berlin Philharmonie with a Prokofiev program before leaving for another extensive concert tour in China, where they will perform in Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei.

If you want to meet the Budapest Festival Orchestra at home, you can check out their concerts at https://bfz.hu/en/