Prom 54: Iván Fischer & Budapest Festival Orchestra (I) – 22.08.18

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

19:30
Royal Albert Hall

George Enescu: Suite No. 1 – Prélude à l’unisson
Béla Bartók: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No 4 in G major

Anna Lucia Richter soprano
Budapest Festival Orchestra
Iván Fischer conductor

The intoxicating energy of their performances makes any appearance by Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra a highlight of the season. In the first of their two Proms together, they pair Mahler’s best-loved symphony – the vivacious Fourth, with its jingling sleighbells and child’s-eye vision of heaven – with two works exploring the unusual relationship between strings and percussion: Bartók’s dynamic Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Enescu’s Prélude à l’unisson, with its slow-build tension.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

The Bartók is one of the few "set works" I've studied without having negative vibes when I hear it.

[Dilbert]

Ah, yes! For me, it was Music O level in 1971. I was a bit baffled at the time, but it haunts me still; such is the power of repeated listening in one's formative years. In particular, the final bars of the first movement...

[jayne lee wilson]

Shame they have to cut short the addictively catchy Enescu 1st Suite, just before its most tuneful and danceable movements...the Prelude (for strings alone playing as one voice, like a cantilena or monody, with occasional timps) is the most impressively "serious" part, but the gravely beautiful Menuet Lent is usually played attacca to it (one lives in hope...).
The whole work lasts around 30' and would have made a lovely Part One, you could even cram in the Chamber Symphony or the Wind Decet afterward...

Oh well! More time for the interval coffee etc...
(If they had to have Bartok, the Divertimento (perhaps a bit overlooked now, after a vogue for it a while back) would have been a better match, surely.)

[jayne lee wilson]

Presenter seemed to suggest that the Enescu Prelude would almost segue into the Bartok - which might have sort-of worked, but we got pause-and-applause after all, so all the more of a jolt not to get that Minuet, so soul-salvingly apt an answer to the Prelude's intensity.. .
Very powerfully played tonight though, I must say... I hope it makes listeners eager to seek out the 1st Suite, if they don't yet know it...

[edashtav]

Ah, yes! For me, it was Music O level in 1971. I was a bit baffled at the time, but it haunts me still; such is the power of repeated listening in one's formative years. In particular, the final bars of the first movement...

It must have been 1958, gosh sixty years ago, when I terrorised my classmates and our crazy music master on “Bring your own Reord Day” with the second movement of the Bartok, my prized new LP , oh dear it was Karajan conducting, “What do do want , now, Grimsdale?” glowered H-S from his pulpit desk. “Please, Sir, you’re wrecking it, you’re playing it at 45rpm!”...[well “les autres” had all brought Pop... but I reckon H-S wanted to shorten his misery.]
At much the same time, Constantin Silvestri was introducing us teenagers to the Enescu at the Winter Gardens, tickets an affordable 2/6.

So... Iván Fischer and his great orchestra were giving me two of my favourite works, and how well they segued together! This time played idiomatically, and with panache. The night music in the Bartok was ... perfection, and the portamenti in the Enescu were just right. O dear, I’m at Heaven’s Gate!
( I dedicated the night music to Claude Debussy as it’s his 156th birthday!)
Concerts don’t get better than this!

[bluestateprommer]

Presenter seemed to suggest that the Enescu Prelude would almost segue into the Bartok....

That was my impression as well, from what Ian Skelly had said. There doesn't seem to be complete success at The Proms, in terms of audiences always restraining themselves, in these kind of segues of disparate works (witness the applause-interrupted Frank Bridge -> LvB 4 transition from the ASMF and Joshua Bell a while back). Very good, solid rendition of BB's MfSP&C just now.

(As a side note, I'd kind of hoped that Ivan Fischer would take over after Jansons at the KCO. Maybe the KCO will make a fresh offer to IF....)

[Bryn]

Reminds me of when aged 11, our music master 'introduced' us to a brief extract from Stravinsky's Firebird, the asked if any of us knew any other works by the composer. I mentioned the Symphony in Three Movements, which, he advised me, I should not be listening to. Horror of horrors, years later I leared that he had gone on to be Director of Music for the town (not the one I now live in}.

[Pulcinella]

Ah, yes! For me, it was Music O level in 1971. I was a bit baffled at the time, but it haunts me still; such is the power of repeated listening in one's formative years. In particular, the final bars of the first movement...

O Level in 1971?
It was the A-Level NUJMB set work in 1969; 1968 (the year I sat the exam) was Brahms S2.

[bluestateprommer]

Pretty good reading of Mahler 4 just now, although I do admit to being taken aback at the extremely quirky horn phrasing at one or two passages in the Scherzo. Ian Skelly just mentioned that the principal horn did hit bit standing up, from the front of the stage. It was charming to hear Anna Lucia Richter in pre-performance interview chit-chat about the subtle distinction between interpreting the text in two ways, with very similiar-sounding German words:
* kindlich (child-like)
* kindisch (childish)
Her German diction, or maybe the engineering, was far superior to Malin Bystrom two nights ago. Maybe at one or two points, she threatened to slip into over-mannerism, but for the most part, her light and bright timbre fit the music very well.

The one point where the engineering fell down a bit was the lack of impact of the great fortissimo outburst towards the close of the slow movement. But on balance, a much more engaging account compared to last year.

Quick PS: I probably shouldn't have been surprised, given the past history of the BFO at The Proms, that there was an encore, although the question of "what do you play as an encore after Mahler 4?" did enter my head just before it. The Mozart 'Laudate Dominum' is archived in the Forum Calendar.

[teamsaint]

A really beautiful performance from Anna Lucia Richter there.

[jayne lee wilson]

It doesn't get much better than that does it?

A Mahler 4th of miraculous tonal beauty, chamber-musical clarity and delicacy, so interpretively without affectation, it almost seems to have played itself (rubato, especially as natural as Ivan Fischer's tonight, is for me an essential part of Mahler performance style) … and a genuinely childlike sound, and assumption, from the soprano.

No music on Earth can be compared with Ours… sang Anna Lucia Richter, but the whole Budapest Festival Orchestra had been revealing such epiphanies to us, delighting our senses for almost an hour, the final fading thrum on harp and strings both dark and golden, those angelic voices offering a warm yet ethereal serenity.

[edashtav]

It doesn't get much better than that does it?

A Mahler 4th of miraculous tonal beauty, chamber-musical clarity and delicacy, so interpretively without affectation, it almost seems to have played itselfo9r (rubato, especially as natural as Ivan Fischer's tonight, is for me an essential part of Mahler performance style) … and a genuinely childlike sound, and assumption, from the soprano.

No music on Earth can be compared with Ours… sang Anna Lucia Richter, but the whole Budapest Festival Orchestra had been revealing such epiphanies to us, delighting our senses for almost an hour, the final fading thrum on harp and strings both dark and golden, those angelic voices offering a warm yet ethereal serenity.

Your opening questioning was, almost certainly, rhetorical, Jayne, because this evening’s music making was sublime.

I like your concept ‘interpretation without affectation’. I did feel that onechorny moment mentioned by bsp took that idea a little too far, it was so bucolic, it was so unpretentious, that it was unmediated Austrian-Hungarian village-band playing.

I’ll finish with that thought: Iván Fischer broadens our knowledge of Mahler by emphasising the Hungarian in his Austro-Hungarian roots. That’s a refreshing and engaging “take” on the composer.

Tonight’s Prom was terrific! It has knocked the Aurora’s performance of DSCH’s 9th Symphony off my no. 1 spot for this season.

[BBMmk2]

How can we go further to what JLW has put above? Couldn’t have put it better myself.

[Rolmill]

A really lovely concert, with the Bartok the highlight for me. What an orchestra, from my seat (front of the Rausing Circle) an ideal mix of clarity, warmth and engagement - and Fischer's conducting seems to 'play' them like a single instrument.

I haven't previously seen the principal horn brought to the front for the scherzo & trio in this symphony (though I know some do this for the scherzo of the 5th) - he sat rather than stood, though.

The encore was a delightful surprise and rather ingenious, I thought - the choral parts of Laudate Dominum being provided by the (many) members of the orchestra not occupied with playing the orchestral parts, and a small solo for the soprano near the end.