An Intense Rendition of Brahms

Ivan Fischer led the Budapest Festival Orchestra in an extraordinary performance of Brahms’ First Symphony to end a three-part program Monday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Other conductors take the introduction as a vast curtain going up on a great drama. Fischer finds a deeper, more structurally relevant image--the ocean tide with its irresistible power.

He begins the music at a slow and broad tempo, and it is only hundreds of measures later, when the first movement subsides in a quiet ebb, that you fully realize how consistent, vivid and pertinent the image is.

Then you go on alert with tension that can come only in a live performance. Will Fischer be able to carry the idea through? Will it knit the music into a titanic whole?

Yes and yes.

Fischer finds the large ideal unit into which all of the music divides--phrase, section and movement. Yet there is nothing mechanical about the process.

It helps that the orchestra is no anemic pit band laying hands on historical instruments or replicas. This is good, old-fashioned, big, bright and richly nourished playing--with eight basses, four horns, and first and second violins on opposite sides of the conductor, like great shoulders.

Fischer opened the program with two pungent early works by Bartok--the “Transylvanian Dances” and the “Romanian Folk Dances,” both played with flair.

As guest soloist, Robert McDuffie made the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto a virtuoso vehicle, spinning out golden tone--bright, sparking, tense and unyielding. Amazing dexterity and power; little introspection.

Fischer gave sensitive accompaniment, conjuring as if by magic the solo bassoon that links the first and second movements.

The glories of Brahms’ music still hung in the air when Fischer turned to two pops encores: Grigoras Dinicu’s “Hora Staccato” and the polka “Long Live the Hungarians” by Johann Strauss Jr. The program was sponsored by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County.