We can always expect the unexpected when the Budapest Festival Orchestra (BFO) comes to town with its irrepressible music director, Iván Fischer. For this London visit, they devoted the entire programme to one composer: Sergei Prokofiev, notable for not having an anniversary this year. No excuse is needed beyond that extraordinary music. The orchestra is presenting a Prokofiev series in their Budapest home next week; I wish we could have had all three programmes.
Admittedly, the Royal Festival Hall was not the packed house that the BFO can command and there were moments of slight ensemble dislocation, which is unusual for them. Kicking off with the Overture on Hebrew Themes, the BFO’s clarinettist stood in front as unofficial soloist, delivering nonchalantly Klezmery phrasing, but the many tempo changes found the orchestra still settling in.
The Piano Concerto No. 2, the most challenging of Prokofiev’s five, needs a soloist with a cool head, a flaming heart and a pianistic ability equivalent to running several four-minute miles in succession. It had this and more in Igor Levit. Prokofiev wrote it in 1912-13 as a young man eager to show off his phenomenal gifts – but he was also reeling after a friend had killed himself and left a note addressed to him. The concerto is dedicated to his memory.
Ivan Fischer (Photo: Pete Woodhead for the Southbank Centre)Levit and Fischer wisely balanced the music’s seething sense of tragedy with moments that can match the abstract flair of a Kandinsky painting or the grotesquerie of Picasso: a 360-degree interpretation that was cool, eloquent and supremely intelligent. Levit’s encore, “Der Dichter sprach” from Schumann’s Kinderszenen, was a pure, poetic antidote.
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Balletomanes might know the Cinderella score backwards, but it’s rare in a concert. Perhaps that was why Fischer, having selected numbers from both the suites, decided to tell us the story between pieces. The tactic backfired, first when one episode was far out of sequence, but worse, interrupting the climactic clock scene. The whirling waltz builds up tension and should career on into the striking of midnight – yet Fischer cut it off in full flood to tell us what was happening. But we’d have known what was happening, because Prokofiev seems to take us right inside a giant clock full of grinding, squealing mechanisms and spell-breaking power. This music is so terrifying that the choreographer Matthew Bourne, in his version set in the Blitz, turned it into the bombing of the Café de Paris.
Never mind. This Cinderella was clad in the gorgeous satin of the cello section, red with the heat of the violins’ sound in that waltz – delivered with real Viennese rhythm – and embroidered with golden threads of trumpet, the rich beading of the percussion, the haute-couture cut of the woodwind and the high-stepping tread of the double basses. By the gentle sigh of celesta at the end, we were sighing for joy too.
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