Ivan Fischer

Opera directors: aren’t they the worst? All those gratuitous updatings and half-baked concepts, when they should really be following the composer’s intentions. Right? Ivan Fischer would presumably agree. In 2008 he launched an opera company, based around his Budapest Festival Orchestra, with Fischer acting as both conductor and stage director. The aim, he says, is to offer an ‘alternative to the usual trends of the international opera scene’, in a venue – the 16th-century Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza – that ‘reduces our temptation for regietheater’. (Note to non-opera nerds: ‘regietheater’ is what angry American record-collectors call any Wagner staging without horned helmets.) This being Fischer, he’s building from an incredibly high base.

‘Audience Choice’ was the promise at the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Sunday matinee Prom, and come on – who could resist the chance to treat one of the world’s great orchestras like a colossal jukebox? Actually, this wasn’t the latest wheeze of some clueless BBC head of music: it’s a favourite party trick of the BFO and its conductor Ivan Fischer. The audience has a ‘menu’ of some 275 individual works and symphonic movements; they vote for six of them and the BFO plays their selection, unrehearsed, on the spot. Orchestral musicians never do anything unrehearsed. They hate it. But the BFO does it anyway, because they’re the best, and they know they are.

In central Budapest a crew from Hungary’s state TV is filming the unveiling of a new street sign. In honour of his centenary year composer Gyorgy Ligeti now has a road named after him. Contemporary classical music is deemed newsworthy in Hungary. Even more astonishingly – and anyone working in British classical music might want to sit down at this point – the ‘Ligeti 100’ concert at the Budapest Music Centre, dedicated to a clutch of bracing new works, was being filmed for transmission prime time on the Hungarian equivalent of BBC1. Here, we’d be lucky if it got a midnight slot on Radio 3.