How to seat an orchestra

The Budapest Festival Orchestra's seating plan (click to expand)

Every few years the subject of orchestral seating pops into the correspondence pages of Gramophone – and always stirs up some interesting debate. And luckily – for the interest it adds to concerts – it’s a subject that clearly still challenges conductors. Just before Christmas Riccardo Chailly brought his magnificent Gewandhausorchester to the Barbican. The following day I asked him about the layout and he revealed that it virtually takes a Papal edict for a guest conductor to re-seat this ancient ensemble (the oldest orchestra in the world). The layout isn’t particularly radical: basically divided violins, double-basses to the left behind the first violins and brass curling around the body of the orchestra from behind the second violins and round the back. It certainly gave a lovely fullness to the sound in the programme’s climax, Respighi’s Pines of Rome.

A week or so later, Sir John Eliot Gardiner went a stage further by adopting an even more authentic "Gewandhaus layout" with the LSO for Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony (Mendelssohn had been named Conductor of the the Gewandhausorchester in 1835). Gardiner had the violins and violas stand (which of course necessitated having the cellos on the right, or else they’d have been buried in the ranks of fiddlers). It certainly helped created a wonderful sense of engagement, with the violins swaying around as they played, concerto-soloist-like. (And being at the same height as the conductor presumably aided the communication.) It made for one of the most thrilling performances I’ve ever heard.

But last night at the Royal Festival Hall, Iván Fischer sat his Budapest Festival Orchestra for Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony in a way that mixed wind-players in among the strings – and it worked like a dream (see my rather amateur sketch of the layout). Fischer divided his violins but sat the first flute, clarinet and oboe directly in front of him, with the bassoon just behind the flute and then the seconds of each further out in positions closer to how you’d expect (though the single second oboe sat among the second violins on the right). Another surprise was that he ranged the horns along the middle with two each of the cellos and violas sitting behind them directly in front of the double-basses (ranged along the back). The “storm" instruments (timpani, trombones and piccolo) sat at the far right top – which worked very well. Of course had it not been a terrific performance this might have seemed merely mercurial, but Fischer, characteristically, made this old warhorse sound gloriously new with numerous wonderfully imaginative touches. Now I’m off to listen to the recent Channel Classics recording to see whether it worked on disc…