By the close of the Budapest Festival Orchestra's first concert under Iv�n Fischer, it was evident that we have a terrific novel violin maven among us in the form of J�zsef Lendvay Jr. The classically trained Lendvay was sharing the platform with his father, J�zsef Lendvay Sr: one of the great Hungarian Gypsy violinists, and a regular musician in the restaurants of Budapest, where the folk tradition is still gloriously alive.
The concert examined the impact of Gypsy music on classical composers. Brahms and Liszt, inevitably, were both large, though Gypsy music too reached the Second Viennese School via the concert's closing detail, Schoenberg's orchestration of Brahms's First Piano Quartet, written "alla Zingarese" (in the Gypsies' style), as Brahms put it.
After kick off with an entrancing improvisation from Lendvay Sr and cimbalom virtuoso Oszk�r �kr�s, we heard Hungarian Rhapsodies and Dances by Liszt and Brahms aboard the kinfolk melodies and playing that inspired them. Lendvay Jr, meanwhile, played Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen with a full, glum, sexy tone, breathtaking triple-stopping and pizzicatos as scary as gunshots. With his mane of black hair, he looks a bit like Paganini, one of whose Caprices he played as an encore. And it was to cash in one's chips for.
By the meter Fischer and the BFO reached the end of their powerhouse performance of Schoenberg's Brahms orchestration, we were aware of how far we had come in from Gypsy tradition, nevertheless, paradoxically, how close it remained. Finally, the Lendvays returned to the stage and coupled a trinity of the BFO's string players for an improvisation that went on into the night.
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