The late Harold C Schonberg, former music critic of the New York Times, once dubbed Wagner "a colossus", and called Liszt "a charlatan". Many have since considered his descriptions accurate - but after this stupendous pair of concerts from the Budapest Festival Orchestra under their founder Ivan Fischer, some might have to reconsider his judgement where Liszt is concerned. Charlatan implies both showmanship and fraudulence. Liszt could be a show off, but if his music is done properly, his sincerity emerges as beyond dispute.
The programmes prefaced extended extracts from Wagner's Die Walküre with a selection of Liszt's orchestral works, forcibly reminding us that Liszt was also one of the great innovators. Tasso, his 1854 symphonic poem inspired by the life of the Italian poet, mapped out the course of classical music for the next 50 years, and contains prophetic intimations of Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Mahler. Listening to his Episodes From Lenau's Faust, we hear the first stirrings of the vast post-Romantic forces that Strauss and Schoenberg deployed in Salome and Gurrelieder respectively. The performances, astonishingly controlled by Fischer, were exceptional. Liszt's structures have sometimes been described as episodic, but in this instance, not a single passage seemed out of place. What we experienced was high voltage emotion captured in sound of often overwhelming glory.
Fischer is also a great Wagnerian, his performances rooted in the combination of erotic madness and narcotic emotionalism integral to any major interpretation of his work. The first concert gave us Act I of Die Walküre complete. Petra Lang was Fischer's Sieglinde, her voice plunging and rearing in ecstasy as her desire for Jan Kyhle's magnetic Siegmund gradually eroded her fears of Alfred Reiter's brutal Hunding. The following night, we heard the opera's closing scene. Lang played Brünnhilde this time, braving the fury of John Tomlinson's agonised Wotan with beauty and dignity. The BFO is one of the world's greatest orchestras, and to hear them play Wagner is an engulfing experience and a privilege.
