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“A fascinating chance to compare a composer's own interpretation with a brilliant newcomer. Ivan Fischer's new Rite of Spring is lean and hungry, razor-sharp and matches his description of it: "fresh, pagan, scary, new and beautiful"...Quite deliberate in places (Spring Rounds is surely too slow) it is full of piercing, unfamiliar detail and accumulates tremendous weight.” The Observer, 22nd January 2012

“The Rite of Spring remains a seismic event in the history of music, still astounding in a performance as gripping and as powerful as this live account by Fischer’s BFO. These Hungarians manage the remarkable feat of making this familiar music sound ever fresh and new — I love Fischer’s chamber-music textures in Dances of the Adolescent Girls, and his Dance of the Earth sounds positively volcanic.” Sunday Times, 19th February 2012

“This is one of the earthiest, most pagan accounts of the ballet around. It’s also one of the most carefully considered whenever Stravinsky writes in a slow tempo...Whenever the music jerks into high gear — the notes cascading, polyrhythms jabbing — the contrast is doubly thrilling.” The Times, 24th February 2012 ****

“Fischer and his Budapest forces possess the right ingredients: the orchestra is well drilled in an interpretation that's as straight as a Roman road; its strings are searing, and brass and wooodwind play in the clipped manner favoured by Stravinsky. In short, it's what the composer said he wanted from a performance of this music. The problem is that Stravinsky did not practise what he preached.” BBC Music Magazine, April 2012 **

“Fischer's The Rite of Spring is sensual and revealing...There's a elasticity to Fischer's conducting that keeps Stravinsky's score pliable...In a word, this is a 'musical' performance, one where every note seems an inevitable outgrowth of its predecessor. It's not the most viscerally exciting version on disc...[but it] avoids what Stravinsky himself labelled self-glorification.” Gramophone Magazine, May 2012

“With every new release - and occasional reissue - Fischer's Budapest Festival Orchestra throw fresh light on the standard classical works...Here, Schubert's "Great" seems so natural - every tempo judged to perfection, the balance between strings and winds an ideal equilibrium - and yet so utterly different from the classic interpretations on record.” Sunday Times, 19th June 2011 ****

“Fischer's beautifully judged and lucidly presented performance takes the work's length as something utterly inevitable and authentically Schubertian in its own right. The textures are wonderfully transparent, and by getting his players in the Budapest orchestra to use natural horns, narrow bore trombones and clarinets in C, he gives an extra buoyancy to the sound, so that every line has its own character and rhythmic profile.” The Guardian, 23rd June 2011 ****

“Fischer looks deep into the music; his conducting empowers the musicians...the SACD sound revails detail and refinements in expression. The fill-ups are fetching.” Gramophone Magazine, August 2011

“Do you perform music written in the 1820s on period instruments, or modern ones? Ivan Fischer here opts for compromise...The result is a bizarre non-mix. But in every other way this performance convinces, with gorgeously in-tune woodwind, a lovely emphasis on the music's Viennese, dance-like grace, and tempi from Fischer that build momentum while also allowing plenty of space.” Classic FM Magazine, August 2011 ****

“As so often with Ivan Fischer, it's the breadth of insight that impresses here...the outer movements and Scherzo have plenty of muscular energy, and yet the lines can sing too...The recorded sound is likewise outstanding: warm and atmospheric but clear throughout the texture.” BBC Music Magazine, August 2011 *****

“What no one will deny is the amazing unanimity and precision of the playing here and the superlative quality of the sound engineering. …the Scherzo goes wonderfully well, with solo violin and clarinets in particular excelling themselves. In the finale, Fischer achieves novelty chiefly through understatement, mindful of the need to avoid coyness at all costs. Miah Persson is ideally cast and as she invokes Saint Martha...it's as if we're transported to a small village church, the organ made tangible in the exquisite treatment of the accompanying instrumental texture.” Gramophone Magazine, April 2009

“…Fischer's feeling of the Symphony's supple architecture, his ability to caress a phrase or point out a delicious colour without losing the sense of the larger flow, make this one of the most musically satisfying recordings to appear in a long time - worthy to put beside the great Jascha Horenstein / Margaret Price 1970 version, but in spirit wholly individual.” BBC Music Magazine, April 2009 *****

“Unlike some heavy-duty Mahlerians, Fischer and his wonderful Budapest band don’t overplay the nightmarish episodes. In the opening movement, Fischer lingers on exquisite instrumental detail without halting the music’s momentum. The soprano Miah Persson is angelic in the finale.” Sunday Times

“It's a provocative, iconoclastic performance, and highly recommended.” The Guardian, 13th March 2009 *****

“What no one will deny is the amazing unanimity and precision of the playing here and the superlative quality of the sound engineering. But how to read a work that can feel brittle as well as heart-warming and graceful? Despite Iván Fischer's eminently sane and central pacing overall, he courts controversy with inconsistencies of tone between (and individualised inflexions within) the four movements.
Some maestros choose between neo-classical modernity and old-world Gemütlichkeit. Fischer gives us both and more: he gives us instability.
Rather than taking his cue from the opening bars in which the jingling sleigh bells might be construed to lose their way, Fischer mixes them down, introducing his own eccentric nuance a fraction later. He permits an oasis of exquisite repose just before the movement's final flourish yet much of the rest is unsettling. While details unearthed are revelatory – often linear, maybe functional, certainly more than merely illustrative – the quest can seem obsessive, at odds with the sense of ease indicated by the composer.
Make no mistake however, the playing has character and conviction, the divided violins enhancing transparency albeit at some expense of weight and blend. Less self-regarding or at least less wilful since the idiosyncrasies are intrinsic, the Scherzo goes wonderfully well, with solo violin and clarinets in particular excelling themselves.
The slow movement is just a little pale, as if Fischer were deliberately avoiding the calculated sublimity and cushioned string tone associated with big-band performances of late Beethoven. The gates of Heaven are flung open with a great blare, possibly a bit much for home listening but replicating the immediacy of the concert hall. In the finale, Fischer achieves novelty chiefly through understatement, mindful of the need to avoid coyness at all costs. Miah Persson is ideally cast and as she invokes Saint Martha it's as if we're transported to a small village church, the organ made tangible in the exquisite treatment of the accompanying instrumental texture. This is just one of countless imaginative touches on an exceptional hybrid SACD.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Whereas Müller-Schott and Kreizberg view the Concerto as a darkly contemplative monologue that is almost suffocating in its brooding introspection, Wispelwey manages to find more light and shade and greater emotional contrast in the solo part.” BBC Music Magazine, September 2008 *****

“Wispelwey catches the grave beauty of Shostakovich's opening Largo, with phrasing that is highly inflected but never to the point of self-conscious indulgence. Add to this an altogether exceptional sense of creative dialogue between soloist and orchestra and you have a performance that richly repays repeated hearings... Wispelwey brings a similar blend of colouristic and poetic imagination to bear on Britten's uncompromising Suite, making it a real journey of exploration.” Gramophone Magazine, November 2008

Exceptionally intelligently planned, and beautifully executed and engineered, this cd is urgently recommended to all with any interest in 17th-century music. - Fanfare

"Total engagement, meaningful articulation and a blend of freedom and intensity" BBC Music Magazine

“…Fischer… rarely pushes too hard. The orchestral sound is lean but not undernourished, allowing for even balance between contesting lines - outstanding in the funereal coda of the first movement - and a clearer than usual interplay between gleaming upper brass and woodwind.” BBC Music Magazine, October 2006 ****

“Stylistically, Fischer is right on the money. He has a keen nose for Mahler's particular brand of the ebb and flow of the music, the way it speaks, or rather sings; the bucolic and melodramatic elements of the score are vividly conflicted; and best of all Fischer really breathes in the atmosphere of Mahler's precipitous flight to eternity.
The second theme of the first movement, which Mahler requests enter tentatively, shyly, does exactly that – Fischer's violins are barely audible, a rosy horizon briefly glimpsed through this bleak and forbidding landscape.
Few take this first movement to the edge of possibility that Mahler so clearly envisaged. Fischer does not shirk the often reckless extremes of tempo and dynamics but nor does he throw caution to the four winds in the terrifying stampede to its cliff-hanging climax. Leonard Bernstein is probably still alone in doing just that. But there are many other compensations here: a great sense of logic and line, a second movement whose homespun accenting belongs to a bygone era, likewise the close-harmony trumpets in the trio of the third movement so touchingly redolent of another time, another place.
But the crowning glory is, as it should be, the finale – and it is here that Fischer, his performers and his engineers, really excel. The 'special effects' of Mahler's elaborate Judgement Day fresco have rarely been so magically realised.
The offstage horns are so breathtakingly remote as to suggest the world of the living left far behind. Moments of quite extraordinary stasis precede the sounding of the Dies irae and the hushed entry of the chorus. And come the peroration (resplendent with fabulous horns), Fischer knows that it is with that final crescendo of the chorus and only then that the heavens really open. Impressive.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“The sound is distinctive, the music-making personal. … the crowning glory is, as it should be, the finale… The "special effects" of Mahler's elaborate Judgement Day fresco have rarely been so magically realised. The offstage horns are so breathtakingly remote as to suggest the world of the living left far behind. Moments of quite extraordinary stasis precede the sounding of the Dies irae and the hushed entry of the chorus. And come the peroration (resplendent with fabulous horns), Fischer knows that it is with that final crescendo of the chorus and only then that the heavens really open. Impressive.” Gramophone Magazine, Awards 2006

“More than half a century separates the earliest and the latest of the works here. The C major Trio Sonata was one of Bach's earliest compositions, written at the age of 17 more or less under his father's supervision, and the D major Quartet was composed in the last year of his life, while he was Music Director in Hamburg. The remaining items date from his time at the court of Frederick the Great. The C minor Sonata is extraordinary, a programmatic work 'portraying a conversation between a Sanguineus and a Melancholicus' who disagree throughout the first two movements, but the former's outlook prevails in the finale. The talented Florilegium players bring out to the full the bewilderingly diverse character of this sonata.
If the Sonata for unaccompanied flute was written for Frederick, as seems likely, he must have been quite skilled, able to cope with some virtuoso passagework. Ashley Solomon's performance is most persuasive. How far Carl Philipp developed is shown by the late quartet, an attractive composition which, besides promoting the keyboard (fortepiano here) from a mere continuo to prominent solo status, is already in the style of the Viennese classics in form, and links the first two movements. The whole disc is strongly recommended.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010