During its recent tour of Europe and the Canary Islands, The Philadelphia Orchestra arrived in Budapest for a February 12 performance at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall to discover that the cargo trucks carrying the orchestra’s instruments and concert attire from Luxembourg to Budapest had been delayed by a blizzard in Germany. While awaiting the instruments’ arrival, which delayed the start of the concert by 90 minutes, maestro Christoph Eschenbach, who is also a pianist, performed with First Associate Concertmaster Juliette Kang and Associate Concertmaster José Maria Blumenschein in Bach’s Double Violin Concerto; Principal Oboe Richard Woodhams joined Eschenbach for Schumann’s Three Romances. During an intermission before the originally scheduled concert program—Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Schubert’s Symphony in C major (“Great”), Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, with Leonidas Kavakos—concertgoers received free glasses of champagne. The orchestra’s tour, which began on January 26 in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, ended on February 14 with a concert at Vienna’s Musikverein.
