Music to the people

Last night was the annual Christmas Secret-Concert put on by the Budapest Festival Orchestra. It's a tradition that every year, the orchestra puts on a show around Christmas without announcing the program ahead of time. Judging from the number of empty seat (I could not locate any) it's a well recieved show and people are into the idea of going to listen to some surprise music. Ivan Fischer, the founder and principal conductor of the orchestra, is really well known in music circles around the world, they are invited to perform all over the world - he mentioned that the whole orchestra was traveling to China the following morning where they were invited to give a New Year's concert. He is also known to be playful, good-humored and very passionate about what he does. In a way, I think he tries to make classical music fun and easliy reachable for everyone.

When he took the microphone at the secret concert, he cracked a couple of jokes and then announced that he would be taking the audience on a tour with the orchestra. What that meant - as we learned throughout the performance - was that they were going to play pieces by composers around the world, pieces that the orchestra had played all over the world. The first one was tied to their upcoming trip to China. He said that the Chinese had asked them to play this piece at the New Year's concert because it would surely be a huge success. The title of the piece was "Ode to the red flag". This was followed by an interesting Japenese piece narrated by a 10-or-so-year old Japanese girl dressed in a beautifully colorful kimono. Then there was a Japenese-written Viennese waltz, a French piece from the 20's written for a smaller orchestra that was really funky with a sax and jazzy style. This was followed by some traditional Latin-American songs sang by a charming Brazilian lady who seemed to be good friends with the conductor.

By this point, I was starting to suspect and interesting theme. As if the whole show was a huge fuck you to the current xenophobic atmosphere in Hungarian life, media and politics. If the curent prime minister, Mr. Orban had been present, he would have gotten up to try to stop the performance at the first piece, I am pretty sure, as soon as he had heard the words "ode to the red flag". Not to mention the rest of the repertiore. There was not a single piece by a Hungarian composer played that evening. "What a disgrace to the national values of our country" - some might have cried out!

After a piece by Stravinsky titled "Tango" during which two members of the orchestra got up to dance the tango, there came the main attraction of the evening: Ravel's Bolero. It is such a fun piece of music! The audience broke into applause as soon as they heard Fischer announce the next piece. It starts very slowly and quietly. Then more and more instruments join in. A couple of minutes into it, I noticed that a large drum-looking object placed on the floor in front of the orchestra started moving. Soon, a young dancer emerged from it. From Barbados, she had long braids, a very athletic body of a dancer and she had on very little clothing almost exactly the color of her skin. To say the least, her dancing was rather erotic. She had a long white scarf wrapped around her to begin with but that came off quickly. Towards the end of the piece, when the music was starting to get real loud and crazy, she danced up to the conductor's podium and started literally grinding with Mr. Fischer, from behind him. Then, to make the whole thing even more ridiculous, she wrapped her white silk scarf around the two of them, he tied it at the front and they started grinding together, exaggerating the conducting movements. At one point, they turned around so that she was facing the orcestra, conducting them, while we could see the huge grin on Mr. Fischer's face. He surely wasn't focused on that Bolero anymore. In the big finale, he raised his arms to the sky and she feel on the floor behind him while they were still tied together with the white scarf. What fun! I certainly have never enjoyed a classical concert more than this one. And as a plus, even if it wasn't intentional although I doubt it could have been anything other than, I loved that it was a celebration of arts around the world, of humanity as a whole, of music as it reaches everyone regardless of race, age or national origin. Kudos to Mr. Fischer and the Budapest Fesitval Orchestra!