Charismatic Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer is keen on philosophy. He cites Schopenhauer as one of the most important influences on his work, and, remarkably, it shows. Schopenhauer argued that music mirrored the flux of human emotion and the tense miasma of cosmic change. Fischer combines a probing intellect with an acute awareness of every emotional shift in any given score. This creates performances with transcendental energy, in which feeling and formal logic are held in perfect balance.
The centrepiece of this concert was Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, a performance that seemed to expand the work's emotional range to take in extremes of elation and despair. With his soloist, Richard Goode, in complete accord with his approach, Fischer kicks off in a mood of profound pessimism; the opening phrases seem to struggle nervously out of silence in a quest for identity, only reaching a moment of assertion when the piano makes its first entry. Goode is commanding throughout, steering the first movement towards a glimpse of genuine transcendence, though the focal point lies in the largo, in which time briefly seems to stand still and the music wafts heavenward. The finale, far from being the usual ebullient whirl, returns us to the restless earth-bound ambivalence of the first movement.
The same mix of logic, emotional daring and drive characterises Fischer's version of Dvorak's Seventh Symphony. The shadow of Brahms, Dvorak's mentor, hangs over the work, and Fischer refuses to disguise it. You're struck by the contrast between the symphony's formal conciseness and the emotional torrent that Fischer, conducting with an almost balletic extravagance of gesture, manages to unleash. The first movement seethes with menace while the tangy cross-rhythms of the scherzo surprise with every jolt. What never fails to impress in Fischer's conducting is the pitch of intensity he generates without ever seeming excessive.
The concert's curtain-raiser was Bartok's Hungarian sketches, an orchestration made in 1931 of piano music composed between 1908 and 1911. Bartok's rhythmic ferocity is only in evidence in the second section, and even here his violence is almost tongue in cheek in his depiction of a dancing bear. Elsewhere the overwhelming impression is of a sequence of modal instrumental solos that seem to hover beyond time and space. The playing throughout was beyond criticism. The Budapest Festival Orchestra, which Fischer founded in 1983, ranks among the most formidable ensembles in the world.
