A Well-Kept Secret
Alan Walker talks about the 16th Annual
Budapest Spring Festival
[...]
I think that the Festival is one of Hungary's best kept secrets. What I mean is that few people seem to appreciate the sheer size and scope of it all. It teems with concerts, recitals, operas, dance, and exhibitions of all kinds. For one month each year Hungary produces a cornucopia of culture which invokes comparisons with Edinburgh and Salzburg, its better-known international rivals. This year the emphasis was mainly on Liszt and Bartók, but many other composers were represented as well.
For me, the chief highlight occurred on 20 March, when the Liszt Ferenc Chamber Orchestra was joined by Murray Perahia. He conducted the orchestra from the keyboard, in performances of Mozart's E flat major Piano Concerto and Beethoven's C major Piano Concerto. This was piano playing of an exceptional order.
[...]
Memorable events were the double billing of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and The Miraculous Mandarin. I heard them twice. Once in their concert version (with Márta Lukin as Judit, and Kolos Kováts as Bluebeard) and once in their staged versions (with Tamara Takács as Judit and István Berczelly as Bluebeard). The staged versions made a deep impression on me, although Takács's Judit was not so polished as that of Márta Lukin. [...]
I heard the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra in two concerts there, under the direction of their permanent conductor, Christoph von Dohnányi. The first thing you notice when the Cleveland players take their places, is the unusual seating arrangement. Dohnányi not only splits the violins, with the firsts on the left and the seconds on the right, but he has his double-basses lined up along the left wall, with the 'cellos and the violas sitting wedge-shaped in the middle of the or-chestra. This creates a peculiarly rich sound which cast a spell over Bruckner's Symphony no. 5 in B flat major. It was the finest performance of that work I have ever heard. No texture was so intricate that you could not hear every note. And at the climaxes, the great columns of sound so typical of this symphony, seemed temporarily to turn the auditorium into a cathedral. There was a lot of "noontide glare" from the brass, how-ever, which once or twice came dangerously close to swamping the rest of the orchestra. (There is a lot of truth in Sir Thomas Beecham's injunction to conductors: "Don't look at the brass. It only encourages them!")
[...]
The second concert revealed why. Dohnányi began with a performance of György Ligeti's Atmosphéres and after it had faded into the silence from which it had emerged, he moved straight into the Prelude to Lohengrin (the audience had been asked to refrain from applauding). The effect was quite magical. It was as if the nineteenth century was greeting the twentieth across the bridge of time. The Schumann Spring Symphony justified the aforementioned division of the first and second violins into contrasting groups by revealing more clearly the antiphonal effects so characteristic of this work. After the interval, we heard the Firebird Suite (the full length version) by Igor Stravinsky in a stellar performance which showed off every section of the orchestra as the shining virtuosos that they are.
Interviewed by Judit Rácz
Alan Walker
has just published the third volume of his biography of Franz Liszt. (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York.) It is being translated into Hungarian by Judit Rácz.
