Budapest Festival Orchestra / Fischer, Royal Festival Hall, London

To found an orchestra, imbue it with a feeling for the profoundest traditions of its central European heritage, and yet keep its playing ardent and spontaneous for a quarter of a century: such is the achievement of Ivan Fischer. But then, it's difficult to think of a more profoundly musical conductor; nothing seems studied or self-conscious, and all unfolds with a continuity and naturalness that feel right.

So it proved in this 25th anniversary programme. Schoenberg's arrangement for string orchestra of his early sextet Verklärte Nacht (1899) can sound turbid and hysterical given with full symphonic strings. Fischer deployed some two-thirds of his players, enabling him to maintain a balance between weighty tuttis and the sub-groupings and solos. The result was like gloriously enhanced chamber music: wonderfully hushed at its foreboding opening and moon-struck peroration; full of magically characterised detail; yet never losing hold of the long, wave-like paragraphs.

As for Mahler's symphonic song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde (1909), no more convincing a performance can have been heard in London for decades. We had in Robert Dean Smith a tenor with the power to ride the heroic surges of the opening "Drinking Song of the Earth's Sorrow", while the poignancy the mezzo Christianne Stotijn brought to "The Lonely One in Autumn" and the great "Farewell" scena was unforgettable.

As for the Budapest Festival Orchestra, it was difficult to know what to admire more: the exquisite inflections of the string, or the colours and pungencies of the woodwinds. It was Fischer's grasp of the structure, moving from song to song with scarcely a break, that satisfied most.

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