Budapest Orchestra Explores Its Heritage

Thursday night at the Hollywood Bowl, the customary, boisterous “Star-Spangled Banner” was quickly followed by the much more lyrical, almost dreamy Hungarian model, played with bone-deep familiarity by the resident ensemble, the Budapest Festival Orchestra.

The study in the anthems’ contrasts (in which ours waxed a bit boorish) served as a fitting prelude to the evening. The orchestra, boldly led by co-founder and conductor Ivan Fischer, was midway through a five-program stint at the Bowl, during which time it will have essayed programs of Beethoven and Mozart, reserving Thursday for strictly Slavic repertory.

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That translated into the accessible material of Czechoslovakian Antonin Dvorak’s “Slavonic Dance” and plenty of Lizst, that Hungarian world citizen. Brief detours into the Hungarian folk-tinged music of Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly capped it off. Throughout, the orchestra played with alternately brusque and tender authority.

In the program’s Lisztian centerpiece, romantic dazzle was suitably highlighted by the delicately raging fingers of Jean-Yves Thibaudet. The pianist, who last appeared at the Bowl in 1995, acquitted himself dramatically on the Piano Concerto No. 2 in A, in which the hushed lyrical moments seem to quiver with anticipation for the pianistic torrents to come.

After intermission, more focused virtuosity came courtesy of the rolling thematic variations of Lizst’s quasi-demonic “Totentanz,” handily dispensed with by Thibaudet’s nimble fingerings and refined interpretive filter.

What Bartok we heard, the “Romanian Folk Dances,” proved short and captivating, whetting the appetite for more. This mercurial landscape of shifting mood and texture is in sharp contrast to both Dvorak’s dance music and “Dances From Galanta,” Kodaly’s more genteel adaptation of folk tunes and orchestral sophistry that closed an altogether engaging concert.

For an encore, the orchestra supplied Hector Berlioz’s Hungarian March, which, fittingly enough, plays like an anthem run pleasingly amok.