People crowded in out of the winter drizzle, stamping cold feet, whispering noisily. The only way to get 3,000 through three security gates in time for a prompt start was to open the doors early – even if the final rehearsal was still under way. Men in woolly hats, trilbies and kippot, women dressed for warmth, grabbed the best seats in readiness for this “give what you can” special event. The orchestra carried on, unfazed. So too did their conductor, Iván Fischer. Only the solo pianist, Daniel Barenboim, looked disconcerted, perhaps merely fascinated by these first arrivals, all ages and kinds, casting his owlish gaze out into the gilded darkness.
The scene was the great Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest, one of the biggest in the world. Franz Liszt played the organ there in 1859, the year it opened. Tony Curtis and Estée Lauder, not commonly mentioned in the same breath as the great Hungarian virtuoso-composer, spearheaded its restoration in the 1990s in memory of their Jewish forebears. Candelabra, immaculate gold leaf, wood, marble and rich ornament, in Byzantine and Romanesque styles, now gleam. (Its contours may look familiar: the Central Synagogue in New York, built a few years later, is a near replica.) Despite periods of neglect and disrepair, this cavernous edifice has always survived in active use.
Out in the villages and small towns of Hungary the story is much starker. Jewish communities were all but wiped out in the Auschwitz deportations of 1944 (about 500,000 of a population of 800,000). Two years ago, Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, which he founded (with the late Zoltán Kocsis) in 1983, decided to act. The plan was to play in all the places in Hungary where Jews no longer live but where a synagogue still stands, “bringing music and life to them and recalling the memory of the annihilated Jewish communities”. They have embarked on a tour of these often derelict buildings. One is now a table-tennis hall, another a furniture warehouse. A third has been ransacked, all the windows broken, birds flying in and out during the concert. In many cases the locals had never seen inside. The doors of one had not been unlocked since last closing, during the German occupation.
Last week’s concert in Budapest was a fundraiser for this project. A fearless and outspoken campaigner, Fischer, born in 1951, wanted to remind people, in the light of new extremism across Europe, that Hungarian Christians and Jews had once lived peaceably side by side. They attended the same schools, played in the street together, greeted their neighbours with tolerance and understanding. (This was the gist of Fischer’s welcome speech to the capacity audience.) His own maternal grandparents, living in the countryside, died at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His father’s family, in Budapest, survived.
Barenboim’s involvement adds lustre, though he claims no role beyond friendly support. Always ready for the spontaneous and unexpected – remember the time he played, impromptu, at Tate Modern – he read about Fischer’s plan in a newspaper and immediately volunteered to come and play. All the musicians have given their services free. Barenboim played Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3, using his own “Barenboim” piano, first revealed with some fanfare in 2015 and, fittingly, based on a version of Liszt’s restored grand piano.
One advantage of listening from one of the upper galleries – originally, but no longer, reserved for women – was being able to see inside the piano lid, where the instrument’s parallel, rather than usual diagonal, strings were clearly visible. The sound was transparent and pliant, especially in thunderous fortissimo passages. As an encore, Barenboim played Chopin’s G minor Ballade, ferocious, ethereal and poetic. He looked slightly wan after, and no wonder: last week, on top of everything, his Barenboim-Said Akademie opened in Berlin. And on Saturday he conducted his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in aid of human rights at the United Nations in Geneva. This man exemplifies perpetual motion.
The Budapest players, too, have their own lithe, distinctive quality. Free from any symphonic boundaries, this remarkable orchestra must also be the world’s most versatile. They suffered heavy cutbacks last year, from the city but not from the state, which pays the far bigger share. Fischer doesn’t know why the cuts happened. He doesn’t ask. Some commentators theorised that Fischer’s outspoken political stance may have played a part. Also a composer, his 2013 opera The Red Heifer made fierce satire out of Hungarian antisemitism and the far right. Speaking with him after the concert, Fischer told me that most of the orchestra’s money is intact. It’s a sensitive time to make a fuss, he says, and he refuses to. Instead he praises his musicians, who are as skilled at baroque music or Hungarian-Transylvanian folk as they are at mainstream repertoire. Are many or any of them Jewish? “I don’t know. Very few, I think. It’s important I do not ask. No one has to play in these synagogue concerts who does not want to.”
Most do, with evident joy, cramming on to the dais in front of the Torah ark and, all but the cellists, having to stand throughout as there is no room to sit. After Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, Mahler’s Blumine (given its world premiere in Budapest in 1889, conducted by the composer) and the Beethoven concerto, some of the musicians abandoned their instruments and formed a small choir. They sang – expressively and touchingly – the Ladino text La rosa enflorece, set to an old Sephardic melody arranged for chorus by the Israeli composer Paul Ben-Haim. Then a little instrumental ensemble burst into some zippy klezmer, led by the orchestra’s fabulously inventive principal clarinettist, Ákos Ács. The audience began to clap in rhythm and suddenly we were in the middle of an uproarious celebration. It might have been a wedding, all over too quickly.
- For more information on the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Concerts in Synagogues series, click here.
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