Iván Fischer
When Iván Fischer conducted Beethoven’s Fifth in New York a couple of years ago, a flashmob of students stormed the stage. They took up positions around the orchestra and joined in the last movement. A similar thing happened during Beethoven Nine, except this time it was an undercover chorus that emerged from the audience. ‘It’s the true meaning of these symphonies,’ Fischer smiles, recalling the reactions. ‘The energy of the crowd, the euphoria. In conventional concerts it’s hard to achieve because these symphonies have become predictable. But 100 students storming the stage? A tenor or a soprano popping up beside you and starting to sing? The audience thinks, “it might be me!”, and that makes a collective buzz, and that is not predictable.’
The conductor makes his points precisely, playfully, without hurry. He’s a spry 68, sipping an espresso and ruffling the ears of Flitty the labrador, who won’t leave his side for the duration of the interview. I’ve come to Fischer’s house in south-west Berlin, where the ground floor features a harpsichord and a Bösendorfer grand (on the music stand: Mozart piano sonatas and jazz standard The Real Book) and up several flights is a Japanese-style meditation room with low lights and a shoes-off policy. Today it’s hot, and Fischer ushers me into the leafy garden where a trio of pet tortoises, Hector (left in main picture), Daphne (right) and Pandora (middle), roam the foliage.
Berlin is one half of Fischer. It’s where he raises his children with his wife, the flautist Gabriella Pivon, and where he’s music director of the Konzerthaus. The other half of him happens in his home town of Budapest, where he remains music director of the remarkable ensemble he co-founded 36 years ago. He doesn’t do much guest conducting nowadays, preferring to focus his energies on musicians who ‘get’ the way he works: more on that to come.
‘‘There’s one type of good conductor: he hears the music inside and he’s able to radiate his vision’’
THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
The Budapest Festival Orchestra is Fischer’s Petri dish. Stage invasions and choral pop-ups are commonplace in this orchestral laboratory. Concerts routinely involve rogue spacing, placing and personnel. A rank-and-file horn player might find herself standing front of stage during a symphony, emphasising some usually ignored inner line. The audience might end up on beanbags beside the players’ feet for true surround-sound. The orchestra might even sing an encore. The experiments are fun and freeing, and they keep musicians and listeners alert.
How do those experiments translate to the studio? Because as well as a thrilling live band, the BFO’S recordings of Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler are some of the most characterful accounts available. Now they’re about to release the latest in their Beethoven cycle on Channel Classics with a pairing the First and Fifth symphonies, and I’m curious how Fischer manages to can the explosive jubilation of that flashmob. ‘Aha,’ he nods. ‘Yes, an interesting challenge. I do it by talking about the meaning of the music. Not the technicalities. I never give the orchestra instructions like “long note”, “short note”. I talk about history and humanity.’
Fischer calls the BFO a ‘reform orchestra’: a model, he says, for ‘orchestras of the future’. And although he’s reluctant to spell out any political analogy, when he co-founded the ensemble with fellow conductor Zoltán Kocsis in 1983, there was explicit ideological intent to their mission. The BFO was a free-market alternative to state-controlled culture in communist Hungary. ‘I’m not appointed by any politician,’ Fischer told me when I met him in Budapest a couple of years ago, ‘and that was a novelty for Hungary at the time. We were a case study for how a different kind of institution could survive – a model of how to penetrate a competitive international market with limited resources. People in Hungary thought it wasn’t possible, but we survived. We survived the regime changes, the financial crises.’ Not only did the BFO survive, it became one of the finest orchestras in the world, rival to the plushest bands of Mitteleurope. So it’s worth dwelling on Fischer’s vision for his orchestra of the future, even if what emerges is an ecosystem so reliant on his own forceful musical character that it could never be emulated wholesale.
Conversation circles around matters of feeling and energy. He says he’s suspicious of craft, which he calls ‘a questionable virtue’. He says if there’s a vacancy in the BFO and he’s choosing between two candidates, ‘one of whom plays perfectly, the other who plays with more feeling and more chaos… I always choose the chaos’. He’s been criticised – ‘a lot’, he laughs – for once declaring in an interview that conventional orchestras only have a few decades left. ‘But the second part of the sentence should be quoted too! And that was: unless they reform themselves.’ So we go through his list of reforms. It includes repertoire (the BFO has break-out groups specialising in period instruments, contemporary music and Balkan folk).