The concert, which launched Extremely Hungary, the Hungarian cultural season in New York and Washington started with improvisations by the cimbalom master Oszkár Ökrös, followed by traditional Gypsy music and classical pieces inspired by Gypsy music. On the programme were Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2; Brahms' Hungarian Dances No. 1, No. 11 and No. 15; and Pablo de Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen. The orchestra was joined for several pieces by the father-son violin duo of József Lendvay Sr. and József Lendvay Jr. The audience gave a standing ovation at the end if the concert and showed special enthusiasm for improvisations by Lendvay Jr.
"The electricity between the Gypsies -- who play by ear -- and the Budapest Festival Orchestra musicians was palpable and irresistible, musically turning the clock back to the time when Brahms and Liszt themselves fell under Gypsy music's beguiling spell," the critic Barrymore Laurence Scherer wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
"Mr Fischer and the orchestra offered Brahms's First Symphony in a luminous, deeply eloquent performance," he added.
Mr Fischer brought a social agenda with his baton for this concert:
"Although I am a musician and I concentrate on the musical side of this story, I am profoundly worried about the growing tension in Hungarian villages between the Hungarian residents and the very large Hungarian Gypsy communities there. It's a very complex web of fear, crime and discrimination riding a wave of growing nationalism. It revolves around the very low living standard of a typical Hungarian village. And with the rising antagonism between these groups, I think possibly the best defense against this growing danger is that each group recognizes the cultural value of the other. At very least, we hope this programme can show how Gypsy culture enriched not just Hungarian music but other European music, and for how long," Fischer told Scherer.
Photo: MTI
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