Feeding the Hungary Within

As the Budapest Festival Orchestra opens its latest U.S. tour this week, it brings with it the support of its native city. The 14-year-old group, which plays tonight in Costa Mesa, hasn’t always had the official approval or municipal financial backing it has enjoyed since 1992.

“During the last years of the Communist period, we were very often considered something of [a symbol of] a fresh new age,” conductor Ivan Fischer said last week from Budapest, home of the orchestra he co-founded with pianist Zoltan Kocsis. “[Ours] was a private initiative which challenged the state system.

“There were many state-run symphony orchestras in Hungary, and this was a new, competitive, private one--without state support. So very often in the auditorium . . . it was very much like a meeting place for a reform age.”

The artistic goal was to build a first-class symphonic group that would absorb music through intense rehearsal, both as a full orchestra and in sectional workshops. That approach has been upheld--Fischer estimates that the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which made its U.S. debut in 1994, rehearses about twice as much as other major touring orchestras.

Because of the many hours spent in preparation and study, Fischer schedules fewer variations in programming and, therefore, fewer subscription concerts and more touring than most similar groups.

“We are almost like a cultural ambassador [for] the city of Budapest,” said Fischer, who now holds the title of music director, while Kocsis remains involved as principal guest artist. “We probably give about 30 concerts in Budapest, and we have a large [amount] of chamber-music activity because I also think that chamber music keeps the players on a higher technical standard.”

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As part of that ambassadorial role, Fischer frequently includes Hungarian music in concerts away from home. Tonight when the orchestra plays at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, in a concert sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the program will include Bartok’s “Transylvanian Dances” and “Rumanian Folk Dances.”

Fischer chose them as much for their intrinsic musical value as for national representation.

“Bartok’s music is, I think, among the greatest works of our musical heritage, and I like to do it with other orchestras [as well].”

The Budapest Festival Orchestra’s interpretations of the Bartok dances will soon be available as part of a recording project of the composer’s complete orchestral works the group is doing for Philips Classics. Fischer views the Philips contract as a coup for his young orchestra, and as a testimony to its lofty musical ideals.

Bartok’s own recordings of these pieces--on piano, the medium for which they were written--figured significantly in the Budapest orchestra’s experience in the studio.

“When we recorded these two pieces, I played Bartok’s own [recording] for the whole orchestra, . . . and it was great fun to record it immediately after hearing the composer,” he said. “It inspired the orchestra very much. It is real, true Eastern European original music, . . . and it’s nice to work on it with a Hungarian orchestra [that] has it in [its] blood.”

Fischer, who was once described by a critic as “something of an old-fashioned romanticist,” studied first at the Bela Bartok Conservatory in Budapest, then with Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Salzburg and with Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Academy of Music.

He considers himself “a real Central European” who feels most comfortable with music of the Hapsburg Empire--from Viennese music to Hungarian-Czech repertory, meaning Haydn and Mozart to Mahler and Bruckner.

The 47-year-old conductor noted that he came from a school of Hungarian-born conductors that claimed “old-fashioned romantics” including George Szell, Eugene Ormandy, Fritz Reiner, Georg Solti and Antal Dorati--conductors who greatly influenced the orchestral tradition of the United States.

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Fischer, who served as music director of the Kent [England] Opera from 1984-1988 and still tries to do at least one opera production a season, brings that opera background to his work with his Budapest orchestra.

“I like to approach the orchestra in a very operatic way. One can learn a lot from singers because they have to breathe. They express themselves in a very genuine way. And I like to encourage instrumentalists to copy and to learn from [them].”

This is an orchestra that prides itself on continually learning and is almost inseparable from its leader, even on tour.

“This is a symbiotic relationship,” Fischer said. “It’s not an easy partnership, [but] we have been together from the start, and it’s a family.”

* Ivan Fischer conducts the Budapest Festival Orchestra tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $10-$48. On the program: Bartok’s “Transylvanian Dances” and “Rumanian Folk Dances”; Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64 (with soloist Robert McDuffie) and Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Opus 68. Presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. (714) 553-2422.