Wotan's emotional progess
Overshadowing everything this month, even the splendid Peter Grimes that inaugurated the LSO's centenary season, were the two concerts given at the Barbican by the Budapest Festival Orchestra under their musical director Iv?n Fischer. Both started imaginatively with works by Liszt, and whilst it was good to hear some of his symphonic poems, which are rarely performed, and never so well as by the BFO, there is no doubting that the heart of the two programmes were the performances of Act I of Die Walk?re on the first night and its long final scene on the second.
Fischer was certainly well served by his singers. If Jan Kyhle as Siegmund did not have an ideally heroic tenor, he sang very musically, and by not trying to force his voice into a different kind of instrument he was by the end of the act able to achieve an ecstatic fervour that was very affecting. Again, as a mezzo-soprano Petra Lang would not seem an obvious choice for either Sieglinde or Br?nnhilde, but in the event was superb as both. Bringing somewhat darker vocal colouring to these roles than we are used to, she still manifested a sense of line that was quite remarkable. With both vocal security and a supremely controlled interpretative passion, this was Wagnerian singing of an unusually high order. John Tomlinson is of course the leading Wotan of our day, and if his voice has now a hint of vulnerability that it lacked ten years ago, this seemed only to add to the power of the reading, in which Wotan's emotional progress was unerringly charted. His cries of "Leb'wohl" as he prepared to leave Br?nnhilde asleep behind her wall of fire will live in the memory.
That these concert performances had the kind of impact that they did was due as much to the orchestra as to the singers. Fischer himself set speeds that whilst in no way diminishing the momentum of the music allowed the orchestra to produce an intensity of expression that resulted in Wagner performances as moving as any I've heard. There was not a single dead note and phrases and details that are so often passed over in performance were given a musical and emotional significance that was cumulatively devastating.
For a London audience, there must be more than a passing interest in how an orchestra that was only founded in 1983, and indeed only started to employ its players full time in 1992, can so quickly have come to have an expressive subtlety and power that puts it in the same league as the Philharmonics of Vienna and Berlin.
Part of the answer must lie in the musical ethos of Fischer himself, one of the co-founders of the orchestra. The original motivation, according to the BFO's executive director Tam?s K?rner, was a discontent that a country with "as rich a musical tradition as Hungary should have lacked a world-class orchestra." From the beginning, Fischer rightly regarded the great enemy as that of becoming routine, and so set out to recruit players who had not only the necessary technical accomplishment, but also the right character of players who would not fall into the role of musical squaddies. Nor do the institutional structures of the orchestra encourage the players to lose their musical edge. There is no trade union, and their terms of employment are such as to make British musicians pale. "Nobody has a safe place," says K?rner. Everyone, including the music director, is on only a two-year contract, and this is with the explicit aim of being able to lop off any wood that shows signs of mortality. "In some European orchestras," says K?rner, "you'd have to murder the conductor to lose your job," but in the BFO, it seems, it would be sufficient to murder Brahms.
K?rner also points out that there are no players on the orchestra's board, and this means that there is no pressure for changes that might make the players' lives easier but would lead to artistic compromise. It is striking, for instance, that although the orchestra is not well funded and its salaries are lower than those of most of its competitors, including even the Hungarian National Philharmonic (once the State Orchestra), it does not engage in activities, such as recording film-scores, that might raise revenue but which would distract from its central purpose.
With musicians who have the character to play as the BFO does, it is unlikely that such external constraints are needed, and in fact the turnover of players is no higher than in most orchestras. More important is that the orchestra limits the number of concerts it gives, not only to allow the players time to practice and to pursue their own musical activities, but so as to be able to provide proper rehearsal time for each concert. Even the simplest programme will have four or five full days of rehearsal, and when the orchestra is on tour, performing the same programme many times, there will always be a lengthy session of "correctional rehearsals" before each concert.
The effect of all this, as was so evident at the Barbican, has been to produce what is now one of the three or four great European orchestras, and it is not surprising that K?rner should claim that in Budapest not only have they never had an unsold seat at one of their concerts, but people will actually camp out to be able to buy tickets when a booking season opens. That itself must be a sign of the health of the musical culture that can produce an orchestra of this calibre.
