From the macabre to the sublime: Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra

Continuing the BBC’s tribute to Ligeti in his centenary year, the Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra began Prom 39 with a captivating display of slapstick: an excerpt from his modernist/dadaesque opera Le Grand Macabre. In soprano Anna-Lena Ebert we had the strangest secret police chief I’ve ever seen. She scampered onto the stage dressed in what looked like a school uniform, in a fit of petulance, and in transgressive mode being first of all barefoot and later slipping into stilettos. With a whacky range of theatrical antics and the vocal gestures to match, she quite brilliantly brought to life the crazy jumble of a text that is supposed to be a warning to the ruling despot but turns out to be the sinister embodiment of his repressive state’s affairs. All the adults on the stage willingly and knowingly aided and abetted the teenage messenger, to the delight of the house.

Sir András Schiff’s account of Bartók’s Piano Concerto no. 3 began so reticently that I wondered where he would be taking us. Not far into the second movement it occurred to me that we had been with him at base camp, savouring its icily fresh air and that we were now in repose and contemplation, with the sounds and scents of the night. At the tumultuous end of the work we stood alongside as he planted his flag for Bartók on Olympus, an emphatic gesture dashed off with supreme confidence and élan. Throughout the journey the soloist, conductor and orchestra were as one in tracing a route decorated with sparkling detail and rich colours – some abstractly and elegantly classical, others earth-bound and emphatically Hungarian. To say it was sure-footed would be to miss the point that it was wonderfully crafted.

Once on Olympus, the obvious thing to do is to invoke one of its resident gods and to regale him with a superstar rendition of one of his mighty works; so we had Beethoven being dazzled by the Eroica. Fischer and the BFO gave an electrifying performance. This poor mortal was jolted out of his seat by the opening thunderbolts, and was then held prisoner by electrodes attached to all the places susceptible to the joys of electrons. Terrific all-round ensemble playing threw into high relief the starry sectional contributions: the strings sang with great eloquence; the winds shone brilliantly; and the horns, in the final movement, took the palm. At the core of the performance was a reading of the funeral march which, for me, conjured up the scene in Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn depicting a party of celebrants on its way to a sacrifice: the offering of a white heifer to the deaf and grumpy old god? Fanciful, certainly, but such playing was beyond sadness and regret.

If those were the only delights afforded by excellent musicianship, the house would have been well pleased. However, there were three other offerings that made the evening truly memorable. First, Schiff’s joyfully fizzy encore - Bartók’s Rondo No. 1, next the whole orchestra standing and singing a part-song by Fanny Mendelssohn (Schnell fliehen die Schatten), and the sight of Sir András sitting behind the double basses, acting as a guardian angel to the proceedings. Magical.