Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring has become an almost annual summer ritual at the Proms. Can it still surprise and shock? Wednesday’s performance by the Budapest Festival Orchestra conducted by Iván Fischer elicited more admiration than awe, and seemed designed to demonstrate the sophisticated ensemble skills of its players rather than to propitiate the gods.
The opening bassoon solo gives a lot away. It can be raw, slightly off-key — in which case you can expect some savagery in its wake. This one was exquisite, ethereal — a real piper at the gates of dawn. And what followed was subtle magic: an elusive beauty of dynamic nuance, hushed adoration and meticulously controlled footwork in each primeval dance.
The evening had held other, more memorable rites of passage. The BFO brought with them a highly coloured visiting card in the shape of Erno Dohnányi’s Symphonic Minutes — little more than ten of them by the clock; but a tingling travelogue of five miniatures which traversed Hungary in the mind’s eye.
After a whirlwind of a Capriccio, showing off this orchestra’s chamber-musical finesse, a Rapsodia hung like a heat haze over the puszta, a shimmering solo clarinet singing through a great plain of finely balanced, sustained string playing. The bows of six double-basses trembled like a sudden wind in the grass.
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Then a trombone-teased Scherzo, a plangent Tema con variazioni, and a folksy knees-up of a concluding Rondo. This rarely performed Magyar miniature was the perfect curtain-raiser. The evening’s centrepiece was equally well-chosen. Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto is the one written just before his death — and it takes long, valedictory breaths of the great outdoors. The slow movement is the apotheosis of Bartók’s “night-music”; and Garrick Ohlsson’s perfectly judged, limpid fingerwork recreated every second of those chirping, rustling sounds of nocturnal nature, rising to an almost Janácekian rapture.The mercurial brightness and speed of response between piano and orchestra made this an enthralling performance, marred only by the battery of unmuffled coughs from the audience, every one a bullet wound on the tender skin of the music.