What makes someone a good concertmaster or leader of the first violins in a symphony orchestra? What qualifications do you need for that shining spot at the front, to the left of the conductor? First of all: you must be a great instrumentalist, with thorough repertoire knowledge. Team player and leader. A cooperative foreman/woman with premier league skillspeople skills‘; someone who knows how to get colleagues on the same page (and bows) in the same direction. And then there are the specific circumstances of an orchestra, the musicians, tradition and culture. As one of the concertmasters quoted op theviolinchannel.com puts it: ultimately, concertmasters are as different as fingerprints. But there is one constant: it is better to leave their ego at home.
At the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the vacancy for a second concertmaster next to Vesko Eschkenazy has been open since Liviu Prunaru said goodbye in 2024. Changing candidates fly in and out on a trial basis: this week it is the Hungarian-German Zsolt-Tihamér Visontay who sits in the first seat, because Eschkenazy solos in Mendelssohn’s Violin concerto. “It’s like winning the lottery,” says Eschkenazy with infectious anticipation about his solo performance on a video for the orchestra’s social media.
But if his excellent, note-for-note rendition was convincing, it is the fact that Eschkenazy is primarily a bull’s-eye concertmaster. All the runs flowed, all the notes stood and his tone blended beautifully with the orchestra – with the side observation that Eschkenazy prefers the sporty gait to dreamy relaxation. It was reminiscent of the text that violinists sing as a self-critical joke on the romantic opening melody of Mendelssohn’s concerto: „Here I am, here I stand, I play the violin so beautifully.” And precisely that subtle vanity, the pulling of the timing, the breathing in the melody, the polishing of a scale into a chain of dazzling twinkling stones – that was absent here. Although conductor Iván Fischer sometimes blew an intimate breeze through the sound, this remained the guiding feeling in the other parts.
Concertgebouw Prize
Fischer has been an honorary guest conductor for about five years and regularly fronts the orchestra, most recently in February. His name was more recently talk-of-the-town; by the NTR documentary that was shown last week about the singer’s daughter Nora Fischer and by the award – also last week – of the Concertgebouw Prize for his “exceptional contribution to the artistic profile of the Concertgebouw, where he has already conducted more than 150 concerts and will perform eight more times this season.” The prize will not be awarded until March 16, 2026, when Fischer is in Amsterdam to lead the orchestra in a program including work by Bernstein and (adaptations of) The Beatles.
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What makes Iván Fischer so special? In two shots: intellectual superiority and artistic originality. With him you can count on special arrangements of the musicians, theatrical experiments, idiosyncratic repertoire combinations. That side of his abilities was best demonstrated in this program in Mendelssohn’s incidental music for Shakespeares Midsummer Night’s Dream – known for the Wedding march. Soloists Olivia Vermeulen and Mirella Hagen descended like elves from the grand stairs, the singers of the National Women’s Youth Choir were ‘hidden’ among the musicians, and rose like flowers for their elf choir. How that choir sings remains a small miracle, as you normally only hear in your dreams: warm, full and dream-clear. The orchestra also made the ears curl with beautiful solos by hornist Laurens Woudenberg and clarinetist Olivier Patey, among others.
But the finish could still gain in finesse. Prediction: Thursday and Saturday’s concerts (Sunday on the radio) will probably be closer to Fischer’s delightful own recording with the Budapest Festival Orchestra (2018) – an album that you keep listening to for its fresh, playful, bumpy, theatrical richness of contrast.
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