VoxCarnyx

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

It  might be tempting to see something formulaic about the recently regular visits of Hungary’s Concerto Budapest under the baton of Andras Keller. Like previous visits, this one featured a top rank piano soloist – Paul Lewis this time – and mainstream repertoire, including a repeat chance to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, of all familiar old friends.

The thing is, this is Keller and the orchestra he has re-shaped during the past two decades, and when they play Beethoven 5 they do it singularly well. This conductor understands the importance of the work’s opening motif but doesn’t hang about to worry over it. The bracing pace of his opening movement set up a gloriously spacious slow movement, still not exactly slow and with magnificent ensemble playing from the low strings that was a feature of the whole piece.

The string sound of this orchestra is singular and special, and as impressive at its quietest as it is when giving its mighty best. The pizzicato strings at the end of the scherzo third movement were as boldly pianissimo as Beethoven clearly instructs, but some interpretations are just too impatient to indulge.

All the other important ingredients of the work, from horns and brass to the crucial piccolo in the finale, sparkled, every player clear in the precise volume of their contribution at every moment, and the flow of ideas across the sections an integrated, collegiate effort.

That same approach was evident in the same composer’s Piano Concerto No 3 from four years earlier, also in C Minor and setting Beethoven on the path to the symphony. On this final date of their tour, Lewis and the orchestra were in perfect balance, the soloist always poised and relaxed, but assertive in his delayed opening statement in the first movement and its later cadenza, before edging towards languid in the beautiful song-like melody of the Largo.

The other elements of the programme were far from make-weight. Tchaikovsky’s Dante – and Wagner – influenced Francesca da Rimini had huge narrative drive as a concert-opener, with the horns and eight brass vying for attention over the powerful precision strings and the orchestra’s timpanist making the first of her many memorable contributions to the programme for the evening.

Wagner also looms large over Franz Liszt’s Les Preludes, his “Symphonic Poem No 3”, and pretty much the only one much played now. Opening the second half, it was also dramatic stuff and a great showcase for the Concerto Budapest strings from the start, big music from a relatively compact band.

It was also the only acknowledgement of the orchestra’s Hungarian origins until the encore, which demonstrated how best to play Bartok with folk-dance fervour.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Andras Keller