Budapest Festival Orchestra/Fischer

Tchaikovsky Sixth Symphony

Channel Classics

THERE has been so much high quality Tchaikovsky performance around, in concert and on disc, that it’s almost a shame to be picky. But if you know the work of conductor Ivan Fischer and his thoroughbred Budapest Festival Orchestra, you will not be surprised to learn that this team is in a league of its own. There are no necks wrung in their heart-rending recording of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, The Pathetique. This is a great performance of the man’s last symphony, sophisticated in its playing and consistently dead-centre in its emotional honesty. Nothing is overcooked in Fischer’s direction, with such shaping of dynamics as you will seldom hear: the dynamics, indeed, seem directly wired into the heartbeat of the music from bar one, through the delightfully off-kilter “waltz” and the meticulously-gauged “march”, then down, down and further down in the extraordinary finale through to the last pulses of the music on the basses. There is nothing like this piece, and I shall live with this performance; and indeed the fabulous Budapest playing and choral singing in Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, an eruption of life to drag us free from the spell of the great Tchaikovsky, to which I shall now return.

Michael Tumelty