Concert Review: Budapest Festival Orchestra with András Schiff at Carnegie

The problematic part of writing a review, is that the problematic parts might take much longer to explain than the non-problematic parts. (As a result, I will structure the remainder of the review in pyramid style (or inverted-pyramid, if one prefers that terminology), as opposed to this outset and rather than chronologically, with the peak up top, to emphasize the overriding highly enjoyable evening.)

In tonight's concert at Carnegie Hall, by the Budapest Festival Orchestra with conductor  Iván Fischer and piano soloist András Schiff, the highlight for me, or the part which I found myself responding to with an unconditional "yes", was the first piece after intermission, Béla Bartók's luminescent third piano concerto. As Jack Sullivan explains in Carnegie's extensive and excellently organized programme notes, this piece was one of the great masterpieces Bartók wrote in the final years of his life, along with the Concerto for Orchestra, the Sonata for Solo Violin, and the unfinished viola concerto. Its characteristically Bartókian Hungarianness is suffused at times with moments of near Bach-chorale-like treatments of tonality, a sort of revisiting of the youthful Bartók who sprang from a tradition of tonality, at the same time leaving the question, What now? (The piano gives comments to this question, in Hungarian.) It is a beautiful, melodious, and exciting concerto, and Schiff played it gorgeously - it is clearly dear to his heart, and it was evident that he knows it inside out, evident from more than just his playing it by memory - I felt I could immediately understand it, as though I could speak Hungarian, even though this was my first time hearing the concerto live.
I would have liked to hear this piece directly before intermission, when the atmosphere to give a well-deserved standing ovation could be present, and the bravos could spill into the buzz at intermission. Nonetheless, the programming of the evening was interesting precisely for its non-standard format: overture - piano concerto, intermission, piano concerto -symphony. The double-concerto made the evening a workout for Schiff! (And, if one considers that, by playing the Bartók's first piano concerto, and then his third piano concerto, he'd by default also played a second concerto, it might be tempting to count three ... )
Bartók's first piano concerto was written twenty years before the third, and is entirely more percussive and primal - the programme notes mention "barbarism" and "cataclysm". Bartók wrote it for his own tours, at a time when he was still strong enough to play it. Despite the coolness of its classical concerto form, the percussive material's explosive verve leaves a sudden and immediate impression, less broad than that of the overarching third concerto. It is also played less than the third, and Schiff used the music for it (detracting nothing from his effective and impressive performance), employing a page-turner whose skin-baring formal black attire matched that of the orchestra's other women, perhaps a signature of the group's look.
The evening's first piece was Schubert's overture to "Die Zauberharfe". The orchestra's seating was an interesting touch: a row of basses brought up the rear behind the winds, who dispersed across the back of the stage. A solo quartet of strings and winds stood before Fischer, and the second violins were opposite the firsts, allowing for play with antiphony. The overture was a good length for taking in novelty, and appreciating the resultant clarity in sound, of the thought and energy that went into these decisions, along with the adjustments the orchestra members had to make to be comfortable playing far from one another, only rarely at the cost of togetherness.
The final piece, however, Schubert's songful and "most Mozartean" fifth symphony (written in 1816 when he was just nineteen), is, while almost unbearably touching, also fraught with the elements that make Schubert potentially deadly to performers. It is full of nuance, and it extends. It plays with major and minor in the subtlest but most pregnant of ways - is one to laugh, or to cry? - in some passages almost every note is fate's weighty hinge to either a joyful flight or a vale of tears. To slough over this is to miss the point, no matter how many hinges there are -  it's as though glossing over a teenager's emotionality with "never mind, his hormones will sort themselves out eventually". The second movement began to acquire this feeling, having too much idle forward direction; by contrast, the third lacked the feeling of its given tempo, Allegro Molto. I found my mind wandering away from the music and to the philosophical question, "Is 'Allegro Molto' a structural element in the symphony, and thus explicable in structural terms, or is it a state-of-being of the performers, and as such possibly intangible"? The players were clearly putting a great deal of energy into the movement, as was evident in the sound, which was vibrant though too rough for my taste, but still the music struck me as slow and dull. As if to confirm my impression, my seat-neighbour, clearly a newcomer to classical concerts (engaging in flash-photography during the performance before being advised that it's not allowed), left at the end of the movement. It strikes me that, for Allegro Molto to sound as such in character, in this movement it may need to be executed as "Presto", in the sense that it needs to be felt in 1, rather than 3, or even better, in 4-bar phrases. This is not a stretch given that Beethoven had by 1816 composed many scherzos, in place of the obligatory menuet movement, that are usually played (and indicated) at such tempos. Why is this movement not titled "scherzo"? Perhaps it is not meant to be a joke, its import serious as a menuet, though the tempo no longer danceable. The fourth movement is an "Allegro Vivace", and here Fischer picked up the pace again, though indulging in excessive and odd rubatos when transitioning between sections. I wondered if it had anything to do with the seating of the orchestra and the difficulties in communicating imposed on the players by the seating- the basses and cellos scattered at strategic places throughout the rest of the strings, for a more homogenized blend. Indeed, their togetherness as sections, in this expanded chamber-music setting, was impressive.
Fischer delighted the audience when, giving in to the three curtain-calls, he asked (in Hungarian) whether the orchestra should play Bartók or Schubert as an encore. The audience calling out alternately, he put it to a vote, which gave quite a bit more noise to Bartók than the Schubert, but enough to Schubert that they played both anyway. The Schubert was first and very short - a German dance - which one?? - and most clearly performed in Hungarian: the first beats were greatly emphasized with both dynamics and rhythm, no longer as a rubato, in which time is taken as a liberty, but as a decided change in style, which aberration the second violins, in continuous eighth-notes, amazingly adjusted to seamlessly. Schubert did live in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the connection may make intellectual sense, though it was certainly a stretch musically.
The last two Romanian Folk Dances of Bartók rounded out the evening, with the extra players for it tumbling onto the stage as it had already begun - and a magnificent, spirited ending it became.