Spring Festival 2008

The 2008 Budapest Spring Festival promises to be every bit as spectacular as its 27 highly successful forebears, making it one of the most colorful and popular in the region.

Organized by the Budapest Festivalcenter and held Mar 14-30, the spring festival focuses largely on concerts of classical music, but also includes opera, folk and more popular music genres, dance performances, art exhibitions and even a circus!Among the most notable international orchestras and conductors are Sir John Eliot Gardiner with the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir; the Bayerische Staatsorchester with Kent Nagano; Ádám Fischer and the Bamberg Symphony; Péter Eötvös leading the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra; and Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre.Hungarian orchestras taking part are the Budapest Festival Orchestra with both Iván Fischer and Pinchas Steinberg; the National Philharmonic and Zoltán Kocsis; the Hungarian Telekom Symphony Orchestra with Zoltán Peskó, and the Danubia Symphony Orchestra Óbuda.The list of soloists is no less impressive: Anne Sofie von Otter; Leonidas Kavakos; Miklós Perényi; Akiko Suwanai; and Radu Lupu, to name a few.One change to the original lineup is that violinist Maxim Vengerov will not perform. Instead, British violinist Nigel Kennedy will play Mozart’s Violin Concerto No 4 in D and Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with the Danubia Symphony Orchestra Óbuda on the originally planned date, Mar 27.For me, the two highpoints of this Spring Festival represent opposite ends of the historical spectrum. The English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir will perform JS Bach’s St John Passion at the Palace of Arts (Müpa) on Sunday, Mar 23, while the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra will give the Hungarian premier of contemporary Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös’s Seven.Bach’s St John Passion joins together choruses and arias through the Evangelist John’s arioso and recitativo narrative to tell the eternal Easter Passion story. Bach’s musical style is dramatic and compassionate, not to mention inventive and extremely colorful in its unusual orchestrations. The characters of the Evangelist and Jesus will be sung by Mark Padmore and Dietrich Henschel, respectively. Many would say Gardiner’s CD recording of the St John Passion with the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir for Deutsche Grammophon is peerless.

Peerless

Peerless, too, is the composer-conductor Eötvös when it comes to sheer beauty of sound and profound intelligence in his compositions. Eötvös was deeply affected by the disaster of the Columbia space shuttle in 2003 when seven astronauts lost their lives, and wrote Seven in their memory. It is a sort of violin concerto, and it will be played by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra with the Japanese virtuoso Suwanai on Sunday, Mar 30 to close the Budapest Spring Festival. Suwanai is one of the most remarkable violinists today, and was the youngest ever to win the Tchaikovsky competition when she was only 18.Seven uses the number as a structural feature. It has 49 players divided into seven groups, the one soloist being joined by six other violinists, who are placed throughout the concert hall “orbiting in musical space like seven artificial satellites, or the souls of the seven astronauts.” It also draws musical style from the different nationalities of the astronauts.Admirers of German opera will be able to get two large doses in the festival. The Hungarian State Opera will give Wagner’s Parsifal on Thursday, Mar 21, featuring András Molnár as Parsifal, Judit Németh as Kundry and Béla Perencz as Amfortas.The Hungarian premier of the late Romantic opera Palestrina by Hans Pfitzner will take place at Müpa in a semi-staged performance on Mar 22. Director Balázs Kovalik’s productions are always surprising and provocative, so this performance will surely be of interest. The title role of the Italian Renaissance composer Palestrina will be sung by Francisco Araiza. Peskó will conduct the Hungarian Telekom Symphony Orchestra.Hungarian opera, too, will be represented in the festival when Kocsis conducts the Hungarian National Philharmonic in a concert performance of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, with Bernadett Wiedemann and Péter Fried. Barnabás Kelemen will be the soloist in Bartók’s Violin Concerto on the same program.The festival will open with Nagano conducting the Bayerische Staatsorchester in Richard Strauss’s Nietzsche-inspired tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra and Beethoven’s Bonaparte-inspired Eroica symphony at Müpa. The Budapest Festival Orchestra will also play Beethoven, the Fourth Piano Concerto, with soloist Radu Lupu, at Müpa on Mar 28 and 29. Bruckner’s Symphony No 7 is the companion piece. Media reclusive Romanian pianist Lupu, who lives in Switzerland, is well known for his masterful interpretation of the 19th century Austrian and German composers.

Budapest Spring Festival
March 14-30
Tel: 486-3311
www.festivalcity.hu

Kevin Shopland
www.budapestsun.com - Wednesday, March 12, 2008