MUSIC REVIEW : Fischer, Budapest Orchestra Emphasize the Lyric at Bowl

In their third program this week at Hollywood Bowl, conductor Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra emerged Thursday more as lyric than dramatic poets in a program dominated by literary allusions.

Shakespeare appeared in musical guises through three selections from Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” Overture-Fantasy. Russian folk legend provided the plot source for Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” presented here in the Suite the composer made in 1919.

That left Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto to represent pure musical form.

In the “Dream” selections, Fischer evoked spritely, electric rhythms and caressed the lyric passages in the Overture, even if the strings occasionally lacked precision. He shaped the Scherzo with delicacy and let it also emerge as a dance. Perhaps most felicitously, he injected yearning, even erotic, intensity, into the middle section of the Nocturne.

He paid the same attention to detail in Tchaikovsky’s familiar work, building finely balanced organ chords in the opening moments and a broad and pained statement of what are the remnants of the famous love theme at the end. Still, he took some dangerous liberties in stretching out the musical lines, and the love music could have been more kaleidoscopic in emotional content.

For the Stravinsky Suite, which he conducted from memory as he did the Overture-Fantasy, Fischer emphasized the subdued and lyric; indeed the transition from the Berceuse to the Finale was lost in the ambient outdoor background noise. Yet he brought the work to a ringing conclusion.

Soloist in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Gyorgy Pauk combined grace and intensity without venturing too deeply into even the limited interpretive depths. He played with warmth, polish and affection, and rightly did not try to make the work a showy vehicle.

Fischer accompanied sympathetically, adding elements of darkness and drama and lovingly crafting the bridge between first and second movements.

Although the amplification system allowed pleasing transparency of texture, it did narrow the spectrum of tone color. Overall, the orchestra and the strings sounded especially dry. More particularly, the romantic horn motif of the Mendelssohn Nocturne was scruffy. The percussive death knell in Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” emerged papery. The mid-orchestral sounds in Stravinsky’s Infernal Dance just about vanished.

For the single encore offered the 11,872 members of the audience, the orchestra played the Hungarian March from Berlioz’s “Damnation de Faust.”