A revolutionary orchestra

Though Ivan Fischer and his great Budapest Festival Orchestra will not be in Edinburgh this year, they are giving two concerts at the London Proms. The broadcasts of these, on August 25 and 26, will unfortunately clash with Andras Schiff’s piano recital and the concert performance of Rossini’s William Tell at the Usher Hall, but if you are free either night I would advise you to tune into
Radio 3.

The Budapesters, it’s true, are players you have to see as well as hear. Their long line of double basses, stretched across the back of the platform, is a visual glory as well as a grand groundswell of tone. Even when grouped in small clusters on the fringes of the orchestra, as they were for Mozart’s Requiem one year in the organ gallery of the Usher Hall, they make a memorable impression.

The flexible platform positioning of this orchestra is one of its special elements. Fischer has recently begun  to invite members of the public to start sitting amid the players in order to gain  different perspectives of the music. When. also recently, he announced that the days of conventional symphony orchestras  were numbered unless they agreed to change. you felt inclined to believe him.

So how will Brahms’s third and fourth symphonies sound when he conducts them side by side at the Royal Albert Hall  on August 26? Not like you ever heard them before, that's for sure. He conducted the SCO many times, and appeared at the Edinburgh Festival.  Schoenberg considered Brahms a genuinely revolutionary composer. Ivan Fischer should help us to see why.
13 August 2014