DAVIS – One of the finest symphony halls in Northern California took wing this season outside Sacramento, serving the University of California, Davis region with distinction and incredible ticket sales.
“I tried to got tickets for tonight’s concert four months ago, and it was next to impossible,” complained a patron at the Hungarian National Philharmonic concert on Jan. 18. This tidal wave of audiences in an area more famous for unobstructed vistas of flatlands and agriculture has been amazing, starting well before the Oct. 3 opening.
The 1,801-seat, $58 million Mondavi Center at the university serves a full slate of varied attractions. But acoustically, the toughest is the symphony—the most vexing challenge of any architectural acoustician.
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The visiting Hungarians are on the move, in the right place at the right time. Hungary joined NATO in the 1990s. It has its foot in the door for European Union entry next year. And it clearly has exportable products, not the least a good symphony orchestra, now making an exhaustive  two-month US tour, bringing along SEVEN (!) distinct concert programs.
Unlike other mainline European orchestras touring the US, this one has only a handful of foreigners in it. But other facets are traditional Old World: For instance, there are only 18 women in the complement of 83, barely over 20 percent. The principal players rotate; just when I was about to complement one man for a stunning clarinet solo in the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, another played a solo right after with matching skill.
Kocsis has a good command of his army, and he has clearly a good grasp of this Hungarian repertoire. The performance of the Bartok was nothing less than brilliant, variously playful, elegiac, nostalgic and contrapuntal. Bartok, living in a New York exile in World War Two, clearly waxed sentimental, for once, about the old Hungary he knew, even quoting an old operetta number (“Szep vagy gyonyoru Magyarorszag,” or, roughly, “Beautiful Hungary”) expansively in the fourth movement. There is also speculation that the recurrent third-movement note H–B natural in our notation—is a stamp identifying Hungary, his lost homeland.
The Bartok got by far the strongest performance of anything in the two Northern California concerts.
This concert featured a triple-threat Kocsis at work: Not just as conductor, but also as arranger and as forceful piano soloist (in the Liszt E Flat Major Concerto), bringing to mind his impressive recordings of all the Rachmaninov concertos in San Francisco two decades ago.
His orchestrations of the piano parts of songs are exquisite. He closely imitates the early-Debussy style in “Ariettes Oubliees,” a difficult feat recalling the textures of the opera “Pelleas et Melisande,” written around the same time. These six songs for soprano took wing with subtlety and delicacy, even though the young soloist, Julia Hajnoczy, seemed far out of her element.
The Liszt Concerto was a hard-driving, percussive exercise for pianist Kocsis and his colleagues. He plays with great technical skill, but quite possibly his doing multiple duty inhibited the orchestra’s bringing out the subtler moments (and certainly inhibited their hitting the beat square-on).
The program opened with a robust, stentorian “Les Preludes” by Liszt—or should that be Liszt-Raff? Joachim Raff orchestrated the tone poems and even the concerto, turning it all back to Liszt for further alterations and touchups. How much was Raff and how much Liszt remains in dispute today.
The following night the HNP traveled to San Francisco’s Davies Hall, repeating the Liszt concerto. There was also Bartok’s rarely heard Dance Suite, originally themes suggesting Hungarian folk melodies, as well as Dvorak’s early-career Symphony No. 3, which did not get an authoritative and pristine playing and made for an anti-climactic ending.
Both nights featured the same encore: Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 10.

Paul Hertelendy
(artssf.com, Jan. 19-26, 2003)