Ivan Fisher: The quiet man who shakes Mahler

The Granada International Music and Dance Festival celebrates its 74th edition by offering new routes to old places. Anyone who has ever visited will know that the starting point is the landscape, which is an intrinsic part of a musical event that resonates, of course, but is also reflected, sometimes obsessively, in spaces and people. Paolo Pinamonti points this out in his first year as festival director, replacing Antonio Moral, when he warns that there are inevitable allusions. He calls them the festival's "identity specification" or, in other words, references that everyone must adhere to because they constitute a hallmark.

Between June 19th and July 13th, there are twenty-seven days featuring more than 100 events, many of them included in the FEX (Festival of the Festival of the Arts), a core of official programming that, since 2004, has spread throughout the city and province, offering free programs designed to musically appeal to other audiences. Pinamonti maintains the traditional structure of cycles with various cross-reading plots, adding a profoundly educational prologue in collaboration with various public institutions. Rossini's opera "Cinderella" has engaged more than 3,000 primary school students in the province of Granada, concluding with five school performances and one open to the public. In the coming years, the initiative is expected to expand to the province, with the aim of fostering interest in music and the performing arts.

In an unprecedented move, this year's festival features a special focus on film and opera, with silent film sessions featuring "Carmen" paired with Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" and Chaplin's "The Circus." Other thematic paths serve to commemorate several of the musical anniversaries of 2025, highlighting the music of Alessandro Scarlatti, Georges Bizet, Maurice Ravel, Riccardo Viñes, several works by the ever-present Manuel de Falla, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, and the Granada-born maestro Juan Alfonso García, about whom there will be an opportunity to write. Alongside performers familiar with the festival, there are others coming for the first time: organists Michel and Yasuko Bouvard; Alexandre Tharaud, a meticulous and inquisitive pianist who has published several texts explaining his unique relationship with the instrument; the popular North American soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, well known in Spanish concert halls and theaters, and the mezzo Georgina Ketevan Kemoklidzea, who has occasionally made time in her well-established international career to make curious forays into zarzuela.

But in this year's Granada Festival universe, the concerts at the Alhambra, and particularly at the Palace of Charles V, where the symphonic sessions are scheduled, continue to occupy a central and defining position. New features this year include the appearance of several previously unheard-of ensembles and conductors: the Orchestra and Choir of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome, with its principal conductor, Daniel Harding , and two programs including Verdi's monumental Requiem; the Stuttgart Radio Orchestra, with its principal conductor, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, and French pianist Alexander Kantorow, in a double performance dedicated to Brahms; and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, with Ivan Fisher, in a single session dedicated exclusively to Gustav Mahler.

It was on a mild Friday night that two almost contemporary works representative of Mahler's disconsolation came together. The "Kindertotenlieder" (1905) were heard in the voice of the German mezzo Gerhild Romberger, a collaborator of Fisher and featured in some of his recordings, along with the Third Symphony and the "Song of the Earth." They reveal the deep voice, the dark timbre, and the special care taken in the musical translation of the text, so revealing when dealing with the haunting verses of Friedrich Rückert, whose personal experience gave meaning to the 425 poems in the collection. That Mahler selected only five suggests a process of concentration that the music illuminates in an intimate and emotional way. Romberger spent a great deal of energy finding the appropriate inflection, with forced forays into falsetto and descents into opaque bass notes. Her performance was supported by an orchestra still disjointed in a scattered sound. A hint of applause arose before the piece ended, and shortly after, while the final resonance was still alive, all the spectators joined in, which surprised the soloist, who made a face of surprise and disbelief.

Rapid applause is a practiced practice with great devotion at Granada's symphony concerts. Even more so when the finales are forceful, as in Mahler's Fifth Symphony (1902). Ivan Fisher and the Budapest Festival Orchestra have had a special relationship with this work since the conductor founded the ensemble in 1983 with pianist and conductor Zoltán Kocsis. Almost half a century later, the performance has achieved very distinctive characteristics, dominated by serenity and old-school remnants. The accents transformed into simple highlights, the melodic warmth, the relaxed endings of phrases, the substantial expressiveness of the upbeats... these are the foundations upon which the performance grows. In the arc that forms the first movement there is the softness in the attack of the "sforzandi" of the initial fanfare, the somewhat insipid refinement and certainly outside of what would be predictable, the sheltered way of presenting the immediate theme, the "glissandi" that lead to the final coda, or the "pianissimo" in which it ends.

This was followed by a scherzo of restrained sound, and the third movement, in which Mahler placed the first horn as the "obbligato soloist." Fisher supported this idea by placing it at the front, at his side, in a decidedly central position. The quality and clarity of horn player Dávid Bereczky, with his impeccable emission, reinforced by interesting variations in the position of the bell, explains the solvency of the musicians who make up this technically powerful and musically individual orchestra. Hence, overcoming a merely sufficient first half of the concert, it was possible to conclude with a definitively powerful second half. It is at this point that we must recall the final sense given to the adagio, warmly played by the strings and harp, and its opening toward a resoundingly definitive final movement, expansive, expectant, and convincing. Throughout the performance, there were several moments in which the elegance of the finish left a somewhat disappointing feeling in the air, but many more in which the musical superiority of the performance was unquestionable. In short, so original as to recognize that, if another Mahlerian world is possible, Fisher and his musicians are in it.