Let's talk today about the world's best traditional orchestra, and probably the world's most underrated too.
The fact is, most of the great orchestras became 'GREAT' in a previous era. Classical music is unfortunately a museum, and however excellent the great names still often are, they ultimately coast on previous achievements. The trulu great ensembles that define our age are almost all period orchestras, or modern music ensembles.
But the era of the Budapest Festival Orchestra is right now, it is a 100 person chamber ensemble whose conductor does not seem to bark orders like a dictator but make suggestions like a professorial advisor. They play fewer concerts than a traditional orchestra, rehearse more, have far more opportunities for creative input, and generally play as though they're inspired to create. Rank and file players even have opportunities to be featured soloists. The love between conductor and orchestra yesterday was absolutely palpable.
Perhaps too traditional the Budapest Fesztiválzenekar is, but what a tradition! When you hear a conductor like John Eliot Gardiner, the limitations of his soul can easily be felt. Whatever his personal character, it seems clear that music which requires an open heart is very difficult for him. For the life of me, I can't understand his sterling reputation in Bach, but in ultra-theatrical music that requires an incendiary spark, Gardiner is unforgettable. The Berlioz I heard from him 18 months ago was some of the greatest music making I've ever heard in my life, but Beethoven requires an open soul, and the only part of the cycle I heard that was truly magnificent was the Beethoven 5, which was so electrifying that you felt the Earth move beneath your feet. But in less evidently flamboyant work, Gardiner often sounds flint-hearted. Not as stone-souled as he was in the 90s, but the essentials of people's character rarely change at the deepest levels.
But there are some conductors, like Ivan Fischer, who carry their souls with them. They can be electrifying, but shock and awe is not the point of their music making. In order to truly experience what's extraordinary about them, you must hear them in person. Conductors like Fischer,k or Kirill Petrenko, or Bychkov, Blomstedt, Sawallisch, Haitink, Jansons, Skrowaczewski, Davis, Masur, Mackerras, Rozhdestvensky, Zinman, Giulini, Kubelik, Barbirolli, Fricsay, Busch, E. Kleiber, Monteux, Bruno Walter, convey something far more intimate, personal, vulnerable. There are other larger than life ways to convey that same big-heartedness (Bernstein, Rattle, Honeck, Eschenbach, MTT, Temirkanov, Barenboim, Harnoncourt, Klemperer, Koussevitzky, Mitropoulos, Munch....) but I have to wonder if that life-sized dignity of normalcy is ultimately not of far more value than an approach whose primary aim is larger-than-life, any list of which would be far more numerous in this quite larger-than-life profession. What was extraordinary about them could only be appreciated in person, where the sound does not emanate from the singular node of the speaker, but in three dimensions, where a hundred human beings sound together as if they were a singular unit, but each with their own voice. The main piece on the program was Dvorak's 8th symphony, and before that came a Legend, a Slavonic Dance, and a choral piece that the orchestra literally stood up and sang. This group's made many great records, but neither recording of the 8th symphony or the Slavonic Dances could possibly convey what was extraordinary about hearing them in person. Everything was so scaled exactly-to-life that what seems generic on recording is miraculous when your ears experience it in the same space as the musicians.
Orchestral life is, by most accounts, an absolutely horrible experience. Orchestral musicians are routinely listed as one of the least satisfied professions in the world. It's not hard to understand why. You are just a cog in a machine, your whole professional life is living in a dictatorship where you must accommodate the many moods of a kind of authority figure never known for their generosity or gracious acceptance of mistake or feedback. The pay is often shit and only getting shittier, the chance of repetitive stress injuries is terrible, the chance of hearing loss is even worse. Orchestras are not made for the age of democracy, so how much more of an accomplishment is it to create a different model of orchestra in a country where democracy has never taken root?
Whenever you hear a great orchestral performance, somebody in the orchestra always smiles, because they know what they're doing is special and they can't help but enjoy it (even if they're not the majority). But this was something different yet again. Fischer is nearly 70 but he looks roughly 45. The concertmaster and principal violist were clearly Fischer's contemporaries and therefore looked quite a bit older. At the end of the concert, all three looked at each other as though with extremely long and friendly familiarity, all three gave each other a surprised nod, as though they knew that what they had just played was something extraordinary, even for them. I don't think any other traditional orchestra today could do what we heard them do yesterday.
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