'It's as if you're circling like an eagle'

With its high entry requirements and gruelling practice sessions, the Budapest Festival Orchestra has become classical music's crack unit. Tom Service meets its conductor, Iván Fischer
Iván Fischer in rehearsal with the Budapest Festival Orchestra
Iván Fischer conducts the Budapest Festival Orchestra. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Over a pre-flight coffee, Hungarian conductor Iván Fischer is reflecting on his last London concert with his Budapest Festival Orchestra. "We are not a normal orchestra," he tells me. You can say that again: having just watched them on stage, the players perform with an intensity and commitment that blazes throughout the band. The back desks of the second violins or violas play with as much fire and passion as the leaders, and their inspirational music-making wowed audiences this summer during a residency at the Edinburgh festival. They're back at the Royal Festival Hall on October 1 with Schoenberg and Mahler.

  1. Budapest Festival Orchestra
  2. Schoenberg and Mahler
  3. Royal Festival Hall
  1. Starts October 1 2008
  2. Box office:
    0871 663 2500

"The whole philosophy is different from any other orchestra I know," Fischer, 57, explains. "There is no job security, no union, and no limits to how much we can rehearse and work." It sounds, frankly, bonkers. What performer would sign up for a musical life of deregulated working conditions, in which the conductor - usually Fischer himself - can insist on whatever hours he chooses?

Well, about a hundred of Hungary's finest musicians, it turns out. The roots of Fischer's utopian orchestra go back 25 years. In communist Hungary, he and pianist and conductor Zoltán Kocsis were part of a group of enthusiastic young musicians, who were frustrated with the strictures of state-sponsored musical life in Budapest. "Everything was decided one day in 1983, when we set up the orchestra," Fischer says in his perfectly inflected English, testament to the time he spent here running Kent Opera in the 1980s and his longstanding relationship with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. "We had a democratic vote and decided that there should be no rules: nothing should get in the way of our thirst for quality. That decision is alive today. We are still a no-rule orchestra." No rules, and no funding, either: in the early 80s, the Budapest Festival Orchestra was privately funded - an astonishing feat of organisation in a communist state. Until 1992, the orchestra got together for one-off projects; since then - after Fischer made every player re-audition for their places - it has been full-time, and "we receive peanuts, but very important peanuts, in state subsidy."

It's a set-up that sounds ideal for the conductor, but unsettling for the players, all of whom are on two-year contracts. Not so, Fischer says. "Strangely enough, the members are very happy. Some of them have also played with conventional symphony orchestras: one example is our principal double-bass player who went for a few years to work with the Suisse Romande orchestra in Geneva. After a few years, he returned to us because he missed our type of music-making." It sounds as much like benign cult as a musical ensemble. "Well, you need a certain personality to like our orchestra," Fischer says, "but once you join a club like ours, you don't want the other, more conventional ways of making orchestral music. It's an orchestra for artists, who relish very intensive rehearsal work."

Intensive is the right word. For each new concert the orchestra plays, there is a bespoke training programme. "Like a youth orchestra, we always have sectional rehearsals to master the technical difficulties of what we're playing, whether it's Mahler's 7th Symphony or Stravinsky." That means splitting the orchestra up into strings, woodwinds and brass, just like county bands of teenagers do up and down the country. "But nobody finds it a humiliating thing," Fischer says, "because nobody has the arrogance to say it's a bad idea. And they love it. It means that the strings get the chance to do their dirty work - the details of bowing or phrasing - before they play with the whole orchestra. And the woodwinds separately work out their own little laundry. It all means that when the orchestra comes together for the first time, we can play the piece without any difficulty. And then the real musical work can begin: we can focus on what's important in the composition, rather than dealing with the technical problems of a single group. We have this joke that we start to work on a level where some orchestras end up."

However they do it, it works. I've seen some of the most exciting concerts of repertoire I thought I knew - Wagner, Bruckner, Mozart, Dvořák, Bartók - from Fischer and his Budapest players. In every performance, the music has sounded miraculously new and vital. How does Fischer avoid a sense of the routine in his performances, even in pieces the orchestra has played hundreds of times? "Conducting is a sort of animation of the orchestra," he says. "And even if the orchestra knows exactly how a work goes, you still need to focus their energies. Imagine there is a big climax in a piece of music: it's not easy for 100 people to create a climax together unless somebody brings it out of them. I think this orchestra responds to me with maximum energy because we know each other, and also because they are creative personalities themselves. It's a combination of them taking the initiative, but still needing leadership."

But for Fischer, none of this means anything without the interaction of the audience. His programming - putting unknown Dvořák tone-poems together with Stravinsky concertos, or Hungarian Gypsy music next to Brahms - is all about creating new contexts for familiar pieces. "My personal priority is to create concerts which go a little bit further into the essence of the compositions. That's what I'm always trying to do: to dig deeper and to find the essence. And it never ends. I am constantly searching. Sometimes it's as if you're circling like an eagle, trying to find the truth." The communication between the podium, the performers and the listeners is the most important part of music-making for Fischer. "There's that Beecham quote: 'The English may not like music, but they love the sound it makes.' But it's not true. It is possible to go under the skin of the listeners, to penetrate them with the core idea of what the composition is trying to say. That's my job. One shouldn't be satisfied with that otherwise wonderfully witty line of Beecham's. I would give up the profession if it was true. In every concert hall, there are always listeners for whom music is something fascinating, elevating, and incredible. They are the target."

· The Budapest Festival Orchestra under Iván Fischer are performing on Monday, October 6 at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester (0161 907 9000) and on Tuesday, October 7 at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham (0121 780 3333).

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