Edinburgh International Festival music reviews: Budapest Festival Orchestra | Géza & the 5 DeViLs | Ilker Arcayürek & Malcolm Martineau
Budapest Festival Orchestra: A Model For The Future / Dvorak Inside Out *****
This wasn’t your average orchestral concert. It wasn’t even a concert per se, but two successive presentations, each an hour long, offering a thought-provoking real-time insight into what Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra are doing in Hungary to “reform” the concept of the symphony orchestra. You could call it A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra for grown-ups.
It also marked the opening of this orchestra’s four-concert EIF residency, neatly aligned with the Festival theme of Community Over Chaos, showcasing the diversity and dynamism of the BFO’s artistic strategy, unorthodox operating structure, and general willingness to explore long-term initiatives that connect an orchestra with its widest community.
If the objective was to get us thinking, it succeeded in the cosiest yet most challenging way. First there were the beanbags, spread liberally around the emptied stalls arena, gloriously comfortable but pleasingly suggestive of the same blasphemous act churchgoers may once have encountered from the ripping out of time-honoured pews in cathedrals. Traditionalists weren’t forgotten. The Grand Circle provided conventional seating, but possibly robbed its “balconeers” of the intimacy experienced at ground level.
Then the two-part content: firstly an illustrated discourse led by Fischer and EIF director Nicola Benedetti showcasing the wider offshoots of the BFO’s performance activities; secondly, more a conducted tour than a straight performance of Dvorak’s Symphony No 8, in which the players were spread liberally among the audience, Fischer himself – baton in one hand, microphone in the other – as driver-guide.
In the opening part, the affable Fischer addressed the fundamental question “what is an orchestra?” They shouldn’t be “dressed in tails playing the same music over and over again” he argued, but a modern living organism whose diverse interests should be allowed to flourish and shape the nature of progress.
Coloured by his own whimsical asides, he directed a sizzling period instrument group in some of Monteverdi’s Scherzi Musicale with a capable, gently charismatic choir formed from the remaining orchestral complement. A tango ensemble struck up vintage tango classics by Argentina’s Aníbal Troilo, then the melancholic exuberance of a Klezmer band, followed by some mesmerising Transylvanian folk music led by a BFO violinist who, Fischer explained, has researched the traditional variances of just about every village in what is now Romania.
The question remained, how would this all relate to the orchestra performing workaday symphonic repertoire? The answer came in the Dvorak symphony. It was truly revelatory to see Fischer transfer his openminded approach to the cerebral intensity of the symphonic arena. He treated it like a rehearsal, which worked superbly because his rehearsal technique is an art in itself, issuing a running commentary that runs seamlessly alongside the music. He stopped occasionally to offer different interpretational options, moving the trumpets miles apart in the finale to increase our surround sound experience. It was a masterclass from a visionary with a workable solution for the future of orchestras. It’ll be a bonus if the beanbags are a part of that. Ken Walton
Géza & the 5 DeViLs ****
The Hub
Violinist Géza Hosszu-Legocky meanders, playing, from the back of the Hub’s auditorium while four (rather than five) DeViLs, their pianist being unwell, stoke up a simmering backdrop on second violin, viola, double bass and cimbalom. It was a theatrical entrance for what proved to be a pretty theatrical programme of classically influenced Hungarian gypsy music, despite being hastily re-arranged for the reduced band, and as Géza stepped on stage, they launched into a characteristic opening number, alternating fiddle fire with languorous interludes, split-second tempo changes and cheeky Bach insertions.
In the Hungarian verbunkos and czardas style, they shifted within numbers between slow, strutting and ferociously fast sequences, lead violin trilling dementedly, double bass racing behind. Together they had the heft of a small orchestra, but apart from Géza’s amiable showmanship, the other star of the show was Mykhaylo Zakhariya playing cimbalom, that hammer dulcimer which in Hungary evolved into a classical instrument and which, under his whirring mallets, deployed a bright, metallic counter-tone against the strings and, when solo, generated a glittering sound world of its own.
It wasn't all high speed: there was an appealing waltz which could have made a film theme (think Third Man), while a tune composed by Géza’s New York immigrant grandfather was suitably wistful, with second violinist Renauld Crols doubling for the missing pianist.
Classical crossovers included a slightly ponderous melding of a Tchaikovsky waltz with a Hungarian folk counterpart, while Mozart’s Rondo alla Turka was given the time of its life. The familiar Czardas by Monti held us in further suspense with tempo-switching frolics and demonically whistling fiddle harmonics and, as an encore, another old favourite, The Lark, featured birdcall violin duels. This was a lark not so much ascending as going for the sound barrier. Jim Gilchrist
Ilker Arcayürek & Malcolm Martineau ****
Queen’s Hall
While it was disappointing that bass Günther Groissböck had to pull out of Wednesday morning’s Queen’s Hall recital due to ill health, what an unexpected treat to have Turkish/Austrian tenor Ilker Arcayürek appear in his place. First heard at the Festival in 2018, his return this year is to sing Tamino in the Magic Flute at the weekend. All credit to him, EIF and, of course, originally programmed pianist Malcolm Martineau for coming to the rescue in such impressive fashion. Fittingly, “Accept, then, these songs” was the English translation of the last of An die Ferne Geliebte, six songs in which the potent warmth of Arcayürek’s silken smooth voice took the listener through texts of love and nature in Beethoven’s only song cycle.
If at first, voice and piano were not completely settled as a duo, Schumann’s Dichterliebe and five songs by Schubert – all sung by Aracyürek off copy – brought them closer together. In a light but resolute grasp of the contrasting characteristics of mood and expression, the beauty of Schumann’s melodies was heard in exquisitely controlled phrasing and perfectly annunciated diction. As with the second half’s Schubert, Aracyürek and Martineau were persuasive story-tellers, drawing the listener in to share more tales of love, nature and song. Carol Main