This two-concert residency by the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Ivan Fischer proved that this is one of the great partnerships in orchestral music. In programmes of Beethoven and Bartok, they presented music-making of such flexibility, insight and passion that I was on the edge of my seat throughout.
Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta has never sounded as lyrical or radical. The unforgettable sounds of the slow movement, the combination of sliding timpani notes and austere woodblocks were creepily colourful but remained part of the work's larger symphonic journey. The fugue of the first movement grew inexorably from its ethereal chromatic opening to a shattering climax before subsiding back on to a single haunting note. The two faster movements were overwhelming in their energy and excitement.
It was typical of Fischer's imaginative programming to precede the opening fugue of Bartok's work with arguably the greatest fugue of them all: Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, originally for string quartet, arranged for string orchestra by Felix Weingartner. Somehow, the orchestra made its tortuous complexity sound clear and comprehensible. Their accompaniment for American pianist Richard Goode's performances of Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos was equally convincing. Their partnership is, in a sense, unlikely: Goode's bluff, quirky musicianship seems a world away from the sophistication of the orchestra. What they share is a commitment to the violent power of Beethoven's music, and to rethinking every phrase. The Fourth Concerto is usually the sunniest of pieces, but here it had an unsettling melancholy, especially in the unstable harmonies of the first movement. The heroic scale of the Fifth was never in doubt, but the radiance of the slow movement was most affecting.
The Bartok of the second programme was even more revelatory. His ballet The Wooden Prince is usually thought of as the weakest of Bartok's large-scale pieces but Fischer made a scintillating case for it, relishing the extravagant orchestration of the shimmering sunrise at the start and the splintered sounds of the Princess's dance with the Wooden Prince. Fischer and his orchestra make you feel as if you're hearing every piece for the first time; their concerts are among the most thrilling you will hear.
