Modern stage
arrangement with traditional chorus
On
Thursday night, February 18th, Iván Fischer brought his Budapest
Festival Orchestra to Carnegie Hall with the Overture to Weber’s Der
Freischütz, Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. Click here
The
key feature of the performance is combining modern instruments while with an
old-fashioned sound. The stage arrangement is in the current fashion: cellos
and violas in the middle and basses in the back; while chorus are dressed in
traditional performing costume and can be easily recognized as Central
Europeans simply from their color. However, the most attracting part of this
chorus is achieved by how they work coherently with the orchestra. They gave up
the usage of exactitude of accents, rhythms, and phrases like most chorus
normally do but used a more warm and complex sound combination to make ensemble
works together.
On
the other hand, the conductor Fisher rediscovered the Weber overture. He
enhanced the drama of the music by rearranging the stage: split the horns and
place them standing in pairs on each side of the orchestra. By doing so, the
opening chorale became more deliberate, drawing attention to narrative instead
of the music itself. In the performance of Liszt piano concerto, the pianist Marc-André
Hamelin was a star. His touch at the keyboard was explosive or silky, depending
on the demands of the moment. Hamelin’s ease in playing this piece was not
showy, but made the music sing. After intermission, the Prokofiev symphony came
off oddly. The orchestra played with substantial energy and power, and handled
all the technical challenges.
The
most interesting part of the performance is the conductor’s idea of stage
arrangement and chorus’s coherence with the orchestra. He innovated the stage performance
while jumping out of the tradition of the human sound in the performance. And
this is the highlight of the whole performance.
