Hungary
Noemi Gyori
The magnitude of challenges that the entire classical music industry is facing due to the coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented. In the twinkling of an eye, cultural life became suspended. Many of us, mostly freelancers and entrepreneurs, smaller organizations, but even employees of large orchestras across the world are now dealing with stark financial and psychological pressure. If this wasn’t enough, we need to address difficulties in partial or full isolation - a highly unusual situation for us musicians, who otherwise are so connected to others and are extremely aware of the essentiality Read more ...
David Nice
The great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau noted of 1920s Berlin that "itimes of trouble, people seek a better life in culture". But what if that culture can no longer be accessed live? Earlier this week theartsdesk brought you reports of two sensational Sunday concerts at each of London's biggest arts centres: a recreation of Beethoven's massive 1808 programme from Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall, and a stunning trio of powerful British masterpieces from violinist Vilde Frang, the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano at the Barbican. Then everything Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
There are encores and encores – most a friendly, minimal farewell gesture from the soloist; some a jolly, festive unwind after a particularly taxing piece. And then there’s the luxury free gift that Sir András Schiff bestowed on us during the second of two Barbican concerts with Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. Jaws quietly dropped as we realised that Schiff intended to follow up Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto (both gigs formed part of the Barbican’s Beethoven 250 season) with the Allegro con brio first movement of the Waldstein sonata.Surely, this was munificence beyond the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Mozart’s piano concertos often overflow with good humour, but you seldom expect to hear a hearty chuckle from the audience in the middle of a performance of one. Yet something close to a guffaw burst out around King’s Place when soloist Tom Poster, deep into the last-movement cadenza of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major, suddenly quoted Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Poster had played the Gershwin before the interval of this typically smart, eclectic and thought-provoking programme from the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.Its cheeky echo in the midst of Mozart’s drolly ingenious Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bartók: Complete String Quartets Quatuor Diotima (Näive)Technical infallibility is now a non-negotiable when it comes to Bartók's six fiendishly difficult string quartets. Still, there's much more to these pieces than simply hitting the right notes and ensuring that the pizzicato thwacks ring out in all the right places. An influential early digital set by the Emersons now sounds a little brutal and mechanical in places. It’s easier to love a 1960s DG cycle from the emigré Hungarian Quartet, with hairy moments but plenty of soul. This new set on the revived Näive label comes from the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When critics praise a first-rank string quartet, convention demands they claim that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. True enough, maybe, but with the Takács Quartet, each separate element really does blaze with a soloistic, virtuosic flame. From the first bars of last night’s opener at the Wigmore Hall, as Haydn plays pass-the-parcel with an apparently straightforward tune at the start of his G major quartet Op.76 no. 1, the sheer class and distinctive voice of each instrumental contribution grabbed the ear.Remarkably, this group – first mustered in Budapest in 1975 but Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
A day devoted entirely to the life and work of György Ligeti celebrated this composer’s remarkable oeuvre through a sequence programme of film, talks and concerts of his music. The final two of these performances were a short recital of his choral works, given by the BBC Singers in St Giles’ Cripplegate, and a concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra of some of Ligeti’s orchestral masterpieces in the Barbican Hall.Under their chief conductor Sofi Jeannin – who led with style, clarity and precision – the BBC Singers (female members, picured below at the later event) opened their concert with Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How long does it take for grief to crystallise into art? No timetable can ever set that date. The poet George Szirtes’s mother took her own life, after previous attempts, during the hot summer of 1975 in the outer London suburbs where she lived. The fate of the woman born, as Magda Nussbächer, to a Hungarian Jewish family in Romania in 1924 has shadowed earlier sequences of poems by Szirtes. They dramatised, and imagined, scenes from his family history. Not until now, more than four decades after his loss, has the vast emptiness she left behind resolved into a prose memoir. Certainly, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
This is a love story and a ghost story. The year is 1934 and the Held family have moved from the countryside to an elegant house on Katalin Street in Budapest. Their new neighbours are the Major (with whom Mr Held fought in the Great War) and his mistress Mrs Temes, upright headteacher Mr Elekes and his slovenly and unconventional wife Mrs Elekes.Almost as soon as Henriette, the diminutive daughter of the Helds, begins to explore the house, she is ambushed by her mother at the threshold of her new bedroom and introduced – in the assured, declaratory manner of adults – to the Elekes Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Ferenc Török is firmly aiming at the festival and art house circuit with his slow-paced recreation of one summer day in rural Hungary. A steam train stops at a rural siding, two Orthodox Jewish men descend and with minimal speech, oversee the unloading of two boxes onto a horse drawn cart and start their long walk into town. The station-master sets off on his bicycle to warn the inhabitants of the imminent arrival of these strangers. It’s not long after the end of hostilities but Japan has yet to surrender. This little Hungarian town is in limbo, liberated from the Germans but not yet Read more ...
Prom 55, Lisztes, Lendvai, Lendvay, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer review - unity and strength
Jessica Duchen
There seems no limit to the sheer creativity that fizzes from Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. For their second night at the Proms, packed out this time, the theme was the meeting of classical and Gypsy musical traditions. And though Fischer, talking to the audience from the podium, kindly explained that the Gypsy tradition is distinct from both Hungarian folk music and classical conservatoires, what emerged was a sense that they have far more in common than might be admitted.Nothing asserts “Hungarian Gypsy music” quite strongly as a cimbalom centre stage. In case you haven’ Read more ...
Prom 54, Richter, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer review - independent-minded Hungarians return
David Nice
Two heartening facts first. Iván Fischer's much-loved crew remains one of the few world-class orchestras with an individual voice, centred on lean, athletic strings adaptable to Fischer's febrile focus (perfect for Enescu and Bartók, not quite so much for Mahler). And though the Budapest players remain Hungary's greatest musical ambassadors, the anti-Orbán stance of their eloquent chief conductor means that they will never be propaganda tools of the new nationalism; we can welcome them back to the Proms unreservedly.Fischer is not only something of a hero for saying what's right; he's also a Read more ...