NCH, Dublin
Haydn – Symphony No 92.
Liszt – Piano Concerto No 1.
Beethoven – Pastoral Symphony.
It's easy to forecast what people will mention when they talk about Monday's Dublin début of the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Iván Fischer. It will be the tree. Yes, the tree. A leafy tree which was placed straight in front of the conductor for the evening's performance of Beethoven's PastoralSymphony. And it wasn't the only adventure of placement on the platform.
Fischer had his first and second violins split left and right, along the front of the stage, and he had the violinists furthest away from him seated on risers. But in the Beethoven he also had the wind players separated from each other, and spread out on the stage, the second oboist, for instance, seated at the front, surrounded by second violins, and the other pairs of woodwinds similarly kept apart.
Fischer is clearly something of an individualist, embracing elements of period performance style and blending them with others that speak of the excesses of high romanticism in music-making. He pulled around parts of the finale of the PastoralSymphony in ways that conductors like Stokowski used to get ticked off for, and his view of the opening movement was decidedly homely.
What was, perhaps, most surprising was the way in which he allowed the orchestral textures to become rather cluttered, for there to be a muddy middle ground in the sound, which sometimes even managed to mask the most important lines. Coupled with this, there was an agreeable clarity in lighter passages, and when he hit is form, as in the peasants’ merry- making of the Scherzo, he could be both light and deft, as well as persuasively bucolic.
There was a nice spring and bite to the orchestra's playing of Haydn's OxfordSymphony but, as in the Beethoven, too many occasions when important material was lost to the ear, as heavier-sounding instruments were allowed to show their weight.
Apart from the two delightful encores (a Brahms HungarianDance, and Johann Strauss's Peasants' Polka), the star turn of the evening was Liszt's First Piano Concerto, with Stephen Hough the grandiose, boisterous soloist (that's what Liszt asked for), playing with a sense of spontaneity and abandon that was simply spine-tingling. Fischer and his players were in the zone with him, all the way.
