The Budapest Festival Orchestra and its conductor, Ivan Fischer, gave two of the freshest, least conventional Beethoven performances of the season at Lincoln Center this week. Music students unexpectedly rushed the stage to join them in a soaring section of the Fifth Symphony, and incognito choristers popped up among the audience members to sing the Ninth’s “Ode to Joy.”
But the high-energy concerts — part of a five-city American tour that concludes on Sunday in Boston — were briefly thrown into doubt by President Trump’s chaotically instituted travel ban. As the orchestra prepared to leave Hungary last week, it was informed that one of its cellists, a longtime Hungarian citizen, would not be allowed to enter the United States because he also held citizenship in Iraq, one of the seven predominantly Muslim countries named in the ban.
Mr. Fischer — who has become known as a voice for tolerance and inclusion as his native Hungary has embraced nationalist and staunchly anti-immigrant policies under the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban — suddenly found himself having to make the case for openness to United States officials, whom he called to protest.
“It struck a nerve in me, a very strong feeling that I will never allow anybody to single out a musician in my orchestra and disadvantage that person because of their origin, skin color, religion or any other factor,” Mr. Fischer said in an interview at his hotel on Tuesday.
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Mr. Fischer, 66, who is Jewish and lost grandparents in the Holocaust, said that he had often thought of Jewish musicians’ being singled out and removed from leading orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic, during the Nazi period, some being exiled and some killed. “Having learned this lesson,” he said, “I have a very strong determination not to allow that ever to happen.”
So Mr. Fischer — who has worked to combat anti-Semitism at home by taking the orchestra to play in abandoned synagogues in Hungarian towns whose Jewish populations were killed off in World War II — spoke by phone to a State Department official. He argued that his cellist, whom he declined to name out of concern for the player’s safety, was as Hungarian as anyone in the orchestra, and that he did not believe that the executive order, which he read, applied to dual-passport holders. The next day, after pressure from diplomats in Britain, Canada and elsewhere, Trump administration officials announced that dual citizens would be allowed to enter the country.
So when the Budapest Festival Orchestra gathered onstage at David Geffen Hall on Monday evening to play the Ninth Symphony — and the “Ode to Joy” melody, a paean to brotherhood, was first sounded by the low strings — its cello section was intact.
see https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/08/arts ... .html?_r=0 for more
especially to the embedded video (57 secs)