A Magic Flute that lived up to its title

Here's my review of the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer's "staged concert" of The Magic Flute the other night. They gave it back its innocence, and with it, magic aplenty. I've sometimes despaired of ever hearing this most beloved of operas performed in bearable style, but Fischer's tempi, his spirit, his humanity and his attention to detail were as close to ideal as one could dream of. http://www.criticscircle.org.uk/?ID=518&PID=5

Save the Budapest Festival Orchestra!

The Budapest Festival Orchestra - which was in London yesterday to give a stunning performance of The Magic Flute (more of that shortly) - is being threatened with gigantic cuts to its funding from Budapest's Municipal Assembly, amounting to 200m forints - about €940,000 - reducing to 60m forints. That's reducing the funding by around three quarters. On Saturday afternoon the orchestra and its conductor, Iván Fischer, held a musical demonstration in downtown Budapest.

The BFO and Fischer on Saturday. Photo: Balázs Mohai /MTI via hungarytoday.hu

To a packed Vörösmarty Square, Fischer declared (according to Hungary Today): "First and foremost we are here to demonstrate that we really love Budapest and we know, too, that Budapest really loves the Budapest Festival Orchestra... We want a Budapest that has more music, more happiness, more love and less hate." He reportedly spoke out for minority groups, saying that the orchestra wants them to feel as welcome in Budapest as anyone else, in an environment filled with music. In the video above, Hanno Müller-Brachmann sings Sarastro's aria from The Magic Flute, in which the sage tells his assembly that there is no place for revenge and hatred in his realm.

Hungary Today further reports that Budapest's mayor, István Tarlos, has said that the city council will continue to support the orchestra to the extent that its budget permits. Richard Morrison in The Times, though, has quoted a "more sinister reason than austerity" behind the cuts. Fischer's openly humanitarian stances have not always been welcomed under Viktor Orbán's government. 

The orchestra has had to cancel some of its schools and community projects as well as some concerts in Budapest. 

The Budapest Festival Orchestra remains the only orchestra for which I drop everything and run, not only superb but also vivid, flexible, positive and endlessly creative. I'm about to write up a review of last night's Magic Flute, which was a musical dream come true. To slash support for a national treasure of this calibre would be to do something considerably worse to one's own face from spite than cutting off the nose. 

Just listen to the BBC Young Musician of the Year's strings winner

Sheku Kanneh-Mason, 16, has won the strings final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year. Just listen to him play this Rachmaninoff Elégie, with his sister Isata Kanneh-Mason at the piano. I hope you're as bowled over as I was during my rushed attempt at a catch-up on the competition's progress.

Sheku will be taking his place in the grand final at the Barbican on Sunday alongside saxophonist Jess Gillham and horn player Ben Goldscheider. Three wonderful performers - I just wish all of them could win outright.

Beloved Brahms

Radio silence here attributable to book. It's going back to the editor on Tuesday, but I am going to Vienna tomorrow and the two things don't really match, so the past week has been intensive. Vienna is to be a wonderfully pianoy trip.

Today, meanwhile, is the birthday of a composer who came from Hamburg, but settled in Vienna because that was where composers settled. He is, of course...

Johannes Brahms, 1853

That is roughly how he'd have looked when he first met Robert and Clara Schumann.

As it's the wunderschönen Monat Mai, the sun's shining and the lilacs are coming out, and things are looking up a bit (London has roundly rejected the Tory party's racist mayoral campaign and elected Sadiq Khan, the first ethnic minority person to hold such high office in this country, with the biggest personal mandate in UK political history), here's Brahms's song 'Meine liebe ist grün' - My love is as green as the lilac tree.

The words are by Felix Schumann - Robert and Clara's youngest son, born in 1854 when Schumann had already been hospitalised in Endenich. Felix died tragically young in 1879. Brahms must have been virtually in loco parentis to him when he was born, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that there's a torrent of generous love in this music.

Long Read - Forensic Eye, my interview with Katie Mitchell

Katie Mitchell. Photo: David Levene 

For this weekend's Long Read I invite you to come over to Opera News, the American magazine from New York, for the May issue of which I've interviewed the director Katie Mitchell. The interview took place in the winter, well before the current controversial production of Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden; nevertheless, she talks about her use of split-stage action, her determination to reimagine familiar works from new angles and why feminism can be a creative force in the opera world. We talked a lot about Pélléas et Mélisande, which she is directing at this year's Aix-en-Provence Festival, and her Alcina there in 2015.

Read the whole thing here.