Notes from the 2024 Salzburg Festival ( 4 ) Ouverture Spirituelle • Lobgesang • Vienna Philharmonic

Lobgesang • Mendelssohn • Vienna Philharmonic • Blomstedt

Also reviewed for Die Presse: In Salzburg feiert Herbert Blomstedt Geburtstag

ALL PICTURES (DETAILS) COURTESY SALZBURG FESTIVAL, © Marco Borrelli. CLICK FOR THE WHOLE PICTURE.

A Hymn of Praise to Old Age

On July 11th, Herbert Blomstedt turned 97 – ninety-seven (!) – years old. And when you turn 97, you get to celebrate your birthday twice, no problem! First with a Bruckner Ninth and the Bamberg Orchestra (see also “ The Subtle Miracle Herbert Blomstedt And Bamberg's Cathedral Tour Of Bruckner”) and a good fortnight later with Mendelssohn’s Second Symphony – the “Hymn of Praise” – and the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival.

Of course, age takes its toll, at this advanced hour of one’s life – and the stiffly moving but self-propelled Blomsted looks a bit like a marionette. His physical conducting is reduced in expressiveness and breadth of motion. But the key to an inspired performance is not forcing one’s will onto 190 musicians (counting the 111 singers of the Vienna Singverein), but to make them want to dance attendance on his every musical wish. And this, Blomstedt manages with ease, thanks to his charisma, earnestness, reputation, quiet enthusiasm, and devout charm, and that’s why his concerts are still such musically miraculous moments.

The Compleat Mendelssohn

Brahms’ Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), op.54, with the disciplined, restrained choir, was a masterclass in matters gentility, sensitively performed by the Philharmonic for Blomstedt. This was the overture to Mendelssohn’s Second Symphony, long considered something of a problem child among Mendelssohn’s symphonies, with three short instrumental movements that are then – supposedly – squashed by the vast Cantata that follows. It’s an unfortunate, perhaps finally waning reputation, given that the work contains everything that makes Mendelssohn. The earnest, imposing music of the oratorios. Some of the fairy-dust music he is best known for. And even some of the tragedy and dissonance we can find in the F minor String Quartet.

The quick pace of the opening was invigorating for not trying to artificially impose more weight on the movement in search of some elusive balance but simply content in praising God – a concrete matter for Blomstedt and not just some abstract concept. The calm pianissimos that Blomstedt got from the orchestra (“Nun danket alle Gott”) were particularly touching.

The quick pace of the opening was invigorating for not trying to artificially impose more weight on the movement in search of some elusive balance but simply content in praising God – a concrete matter for Blomstedt and not just some abstract concept. The calm pianissimos that Blomstedt got from the orchestra (“Nun danket alle Gott”) were particularly touching.

F. Mendelssohn-B The Symphonies C.v.Dohnányi, Vienna Philharmonic Decca, 2010

Save Thyself!

Not everything went as smoothly. Towards the end, the performance lacked the crucial impulse, that would have imbued this “Hymn of Praise” with the needed pulse. Nor were the ‘almost-dissonant’, which can add a welcome bitter-sweet fragrance, particularly tended to. When the chorus nearly threw a fugato passage (“Die Nacht ist vergangen”), there was no help to be gotten from Blomstedt. The Singverein managed to rescue itself splendidly.

The soloists were right in line with the high quality and character of the performance – namely the level-headed, narrative, perfectly singing of tenor Tilman Lichidi (despite a weaker, flat moment later in the duet) and the effective, nicely enunciating Christina Landshamer, with a tastefully increasing but never overly dramatic vibrato on the held notes – and contributed to this wholly untroubled, Lord-praising eleven-AM performance. Grateful ovations when Blomstedt was led off and back on the stage, by concertmaster Rainer Honeck.

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Photo descriptions:

Picture No.1: Wiener Philharmoniker · Blomstedt 2024: Herbert Blomstedt (Dirigent), Wiener Philharmoniker

Picture No.2: Wiener Philharmoniker · Blomstedt 2024: Elsa Benoit (Sopran II), Christina Landshamer (Sopran I), Herbert Blomstedt (Dirigent), Tilman Lichdi (Tenor), Wiener Philharmoniker, Wiener Singverein

Notes from the 2024 Salzburg Festival ( 3 ) Time with Schoenberg • The City Without Jews

The City Without Jews • PHACE • Olga Neuwirth

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Olga Neuwirths Musik hat zu „Die Stadt ohne Juden“ nichts zu sagen

ALL PICTURES (DETAILS) COURTESY SALZBURG FESTIVAL, © Marco Borrelli. CLICK FOR THE WHOLE PICTURE.

The Good Austrian

The City Without Jews, a 1924 Austrian Expressionist film by Hans Karl Breslauer based on the novel of the same title by Hugo Bettauer, was first shown 100 years ago. For many years it was deemed lost, but after an intact copy was unexpectedly found some years ago, the Austrian Film Institute has stitched the film back together and made digital copies of it. While it’s good to have this rare film available and while it feels good (for Austrians, particularly, one reckons) to know that there were “good people” out there, who stood up against antisemitism, the quality of the film and the print – and its copies – is variable and dodgy.

Fourteen Ways to Describe the Rain

Hugo Bettauer , The City without Jews

The Salzburg Festival screened the film as part of their “Time with Schoenberg” series – although there was little (none, in fact) Schoenberg involved in this project. The new soundtrack was composed by Olga Neuwirth and a little prelude came courtesy of Hanns Eisler. Very apropos for Salzburg, that work was the Fourteen Ways to Describe the Rain. Well, as far as Salzburg is concerned, there are the impotent fat drops, that lazily plop from above, announcing an impending storm. There are middle-sized ones, that offer half trepidation, half hope, with a thunderstorm already or still being stuck behind one of the surrounding mountains. And then there are mean little needles of drops, that shoots down your neck from behind – themselves a prelude to the specific drizzle the locals call “ Schnürlregen”, a straight, light put consistent pour that has a dispiriting, it-will-never-end quality about it.

A Dearth of Ideas

Led by Nacho de Paz, the PHACE Ensemble performed the Eissler excellently (especially violist Petra Ackermann gave her best to make music out of Eisler’s quickly tiresome note salad) and the film music properly, along to their click-track. But the music was not particularly rewarding. Neuwirth's apparent dearth of ideas for the music to this film was baffling. At least half of it was smeared with a monotonously ominous, reverberant droning sound – quite regardless to what the film shows: Love scene: Droning. Singing in the synagogue: Droning. The only notable deviations are the interlacing of Austrian clichés (jodling, zither-music, and voice fragments of Hans Moser, a famous Austrian actor who had one of his first starring rôles in this film and whose apt physical comedy is already on display) into the soundtrack – and one telephone, that actually rings. The film’s banal depiction of the reasons for the economic and financial crisis in Austria is close to being an antisemitic trope itself; the actual antisemitism that the film ridicules is so over-the-top, it’s a bit too easy to be against it. And the “good Jew” of the film, Johannes Riemann might be a sympathetic proto-Mr. Bean, but nine years later, he became Nazi Party member No. 2641955. Well, we can’t all be on the right side of history, I suppose.

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Photo descriptions:

Picture No.1: Zeit mit SCHÖNBERG – Die Stadt ohne Juden 2024: PHACE

Picture No.2: Zeit mit SCHÖNBERG – Die Stadt ohne Juden 2024: Nacho de Paz (Dirigent), PHACE

Notes from the 2024 Salzburg Festival ( 2 ) Ouverture Spirituelle • Te Deum & Mozart Matinee

Te Deum — La Capella Reial • Le Concert des Nations • Savall

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Strahlende Trauermusik mit Jordi Savall und Adám Fischer

ALL PICTURES (DETAILS) COURTESY SALZBURG FESTIVAL, © Marco Borrelli. CLICK FOR THE WHOLE PICTURE.

Evening and Mourning: De Profundis for Wolfgang Rihm

No one knew Friday evening, when Jordi Savall performed Michel-Richard Delalande’s (and Arvo Pärt’s) De Profundis. And When Adám Fischer conducted Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music at the Saturday Mozart Matinee, news had just reached Salzburg that Wolfgang Rihm had died that night. In retrospect, those two concerts took on the character of a musical leave-taking from arguably the most respected living German composer and a dear human being.

Charpentier Te Deum Ensemble Les Surprises Alpha, 2024

The sun was just laying last bands of warm yellows across the battlements, church towers, and roofs of Salzburg when the sounds of early French baroque filled the Collegiate Church, courtesy of Le Concert des Nations and Jordi Savall, who made his way to stage with a crutch and his face that looks like an apostle carved from wood. The center of this Tootsie Pop, between Delalande and the timeless minimalism of Pärt, was Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s grand Te Deum, which Europeans of a certain age invariably associate with childhood moments in front of the TV, maybe for the Four Hills ski jumping tournament or the Eurovision Song Contest, seeing that the opening prelude is the signal of the “Eurovision” pan-European broadcasts. Only that that version is rather more stately than the tempestuous trumpets and snappy timpani were, that Savall & Co. hurled at the enthused audience – eliciting early Bravos after the “In te, Domine, speravi” faded away into the generous acoustic of the ideally suited (and carefully prepared) church space.

Throughout the evening, the young La Capella Reial de Catalunya choir radiated with musical joy, like a big family in a choral outing. The soloists from its own ranks pleased with fresh and clear interpretations – above all the positively glowing (it may partly have been the advanced state of pregnancy) soprano of Elionor Martínez. Mezzo Kristin Mulders added her incisive, blazing instrument into the mix, although the tight, pronounced vibrato did not quite gel with the other, purer voices.

The short encore, Pärt’s Da pacem Domine (written for Savall and inspired by the 2004 Madrid train bombings), opened like a Gregorian chorale before the typical Pärt-isms chimed in: The chords that drift apart, the shifting long vocal lines, the regular time signature of the timpani, all resting on a subtle, almost unnoticeable bed of gently buzzing strings.

Funereal and Rocking Mozart from A.Fischer

W.A.Mozart 45 Symphonies Danish National CO Dacapo, 2013

Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music, which Adám Fischer and the Mozarteum Orchestra performed, is not his best work – but it’s one of the more distinct ones in his output. The earthy, dark, woodwind-centered piece made for a most memorable curtain raiser, followed by a far less memorable D-minor Piano Concerto (K.466) in which the young Lukas Sternath, who won just about every prize at the 2022 ARD Music Competition, played flawless and lovely enough (“achingly sincere” is Tim Page’s suggestion for a put-down on such an occasion), but never achieved lift-off.

As if to prove that neither orchestra nor the conductor were to blame, Fischer and the Salzburgers went for a zany “Linz” Symphony that sparkled and crackled from start to end. With a smile across its collective face, the Mozarteum Orchestra delivered drive instead of legato, short but never choppy phrasing, and their joy transferred unto the audience’s – reminding us, why it is Adám Fischer, who currently has the best Mozart Symphony Cycle to his name.

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Photo descriptions:

Picture No.1: Te Deum – La Capella Reial · Le Concert des Nations · Savall 2024: Jordi Savall (Dirigent), Le Concert des Nations, Solisten

Picture No.2: Mozart-Matinee · A. Fischer 2024: Adam Fischer (Dirigent), Mozarteumorchester Salzburg

Notes from the 2024 Salzburg Festival ( 1 ) Overture Spirituelle • Koma & Le noir de l'étoile

Koma • Georg Friedrich Haas • Klangforum Wien

Also reviewed for Die Presse: Haas und Grisey: Hier spielen kollabierte Sterne die Musik

ABOVE PICTURES (DETAILS) COURTESY SALZBURG FESTIVAL, © Marco Borrelli. CLICK FOR THE WHOLE PICTURE.

Blackout

As my colleague was stuck somewhere in northern Franconia, trying to experience opera in the dark, with only the German Railway between him and Bayreuth, I had made my way to the Salzburg Festival – back after ten years – to experience opera in the-even-darker. Because what Wagner achieved with Tristan 140 years ago, Georg Friedrich Haas has managed now with Koma, his opera that premiered 2016 in Schwetzingen. And pitch-black it really was, in the Great Hall of the Mozarteum, because the bureaucracy played ball and, in exchange for personal at every door, allowed the Festival to tape over the emergency exit signs. You could see the faintest outlines of light ions creeping through the cracks around some of the doors, but not your own hand before your face. You could turn to your seat neighbor and poke your tongue out and no one would have been the wiser for it. Barring a bad case of halitosis, that is, because with the visual sense gone, all other senses were heightened. That said, you wouldn’t need Haas’ music to attain that effect – I reckon that a Mozart Requiem, Gesualdo Madrigals, or something by Philip Glass might work as well and better.

There was a sensual element to the music as it rose, gently at first: metallic clouds, pierced by piano and brass, a whaling accordion. The music sounded positively amplified, but nothing was – it all came from the way the timbres were mixed and the voices resonated in the fine acoustic. The brass would occasionally throw fanfares against the string clusters, that sounded like elephants in heat. The piano – and its out of tune upright companion – were prominent… and responsible for much of the beauty of the score, because Haas, while modern and complex enough to be on the good side of the journalist, musicologist, and academic coteries, is also non-ideological enough to step off the avant-garde pedal every so often, letting glimmers of humanity and consonance shimmer through.

He was much helped by the excellent performance of the Klangforum Wien which was led – during the brief lit and semi-lit moments, anyway, by Bas Wiegers. Not that you can strictly tell, but they sounded on point, sharp, and certainly good, as they played their way through the score – and most of it by heart. The same goes for the singers, who all somehow sounded uncommonly good, notably trading words between each other, even for simple, single sentences. Only Daniel Gloger couldn’t go for all-beauty, because his role as “Mother” (apart from “Alexander”) demanded a more grotesque take. Outstanding amid the general excellence were Pia Davila’s Jasmine (sister of the comatose protagonist, Michaela) and Peter Schöne’s Michael (husband of Michaela).

As for the story by Klaus Händl, Haas’ go-to librettist, there’s a Michaela and she’s in a coma. Given the constant darkness, you had better read the libretto before or after, because there was little to follow during the performance. She’s taken care of, it seems, every once in a while, she or her memory wails away from above in the back (Sarah Aristidou), hospital procedures are described, and there is a good deal of good old German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Her mother is revealed to have been a Kostelnička-type (except cartoonish wicked, unlike the tortured and deeply moral original) – which gave intermittent cause if you can actually come to terms with your past, if you just make it out to have been evil, rather than trying to understand the “others’” point of view. But that might be perhaps asking for more than the libretto was ever willing to give, getting stuck on a reasonably harmless and superficial level.

By the time the creaking trombones announce the end of the opera, which drags itself from line to line to its end, it has overstayed its welcome by maybe half an hour. The lights-off-lights-on back and forth, which even if following a libretto had been possible, did not make obvious dramatic sense, was no longer as novel at this point, nor was the music. Still: the experience as such was one that is bound to stay with every attendee.

Le noir de l’étoile • Gérard Grisey • Motus Percussion

Messages from the Past

G.Grisey, Le noir de l’étoile Percussions de Strasbourg Harmonia Mundi

Having awoken from the coma, the schedule beckoned to the Collegiate Church for a 10PM performance of Gérard Grisey’s 1990 Le noir de l’étoile for six percussionists, tape, and electronics. Darkness reigned again, but since the emergency exit signs were not covered, this time, the white interior of the Kollegienkirche shone in eerie mint green. The six percussion sets, distributed equally around the church, were spotlit. The audience, facing the center, sat in the middle of all this.

Essentially, Le noir de l’étoile is an hour of drumming. If six drummers banging on for about an hour sounds eerily much like the final part of Rihm’s Tutuguri—Poème dansé (review of the 2010 Salzburg performance here), worry not. There are limits as to how far that sort of thing can go, granted. And the presumed idea of a pulse traveling around the listener, from one percussion station to another – a b it à la Gesang der Jünglinge, I imagine – didn’t quite work out, either, perhaps because the principally gorgeous acoustic of the church made matters a bit too diffuse for that. But there was a communal quality to the proceedings, listening to the acoustic soundprints of pulsars PSR B0329+54 and Velar flutter in through the speakers, as interludes. Cosmic signals from thousands of years ago; messages from collapsed stars, on which we can eavesdrop on earth and which can lead to our contemplation of human existence, the futility of our micro-second in this universe, unnoticed and utterly irrelevant, except to us.

These kinds of existential thoughts, fortunately, can be wiped away easy enough, with a sausage and a beer, courtesy “Heiße Kiste”, the much appreciated mobile late-night sausage stand on the other and of the “State Bridge” that will assist putting the humans at the proper center of their universe again.


Photo descriptions:

Picture No.1: Koma — Klangforum Wien · Wiegers 2024: Peter Schöne (Michael), Daniel Gloger (Alexander/Mutter), Pia Davila (Jasmin), Bas Wiegers (Musikalische Leitung), Susanne Gritschneder (Dr. Auer), Henriette Gödde (Dr. Schönbühl), Karl Huml (Pfleger Jonas), Benjamin Chamandy (Pfleger Nikos), Raphael Sigling (Pfleger Zdravko), Klangforum Wien

Picture No.2: Le Noir de l’Étoile — Sietzen & Motus Percussion 2024: Christoph Sietzen (Schlagwerk), Motus Percussion

NSO goes to the movies at Wolf Trap

More and more orchestras have added live music accompanying film screenings to the lighter side of their repertory in the last fifteen years. The National Symphony Orchestra gives a much-needed estival twist to this trend by hosting such performances during their summer residency at Wolf Trap. On Wednesday night, another capacity crowd filled the Filene Center and its lawn for the latest in the series, a screening of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, in spite of the humidity and occasional spritz of rain.

Such performances do not generally merit comment at Washington Classical Review, but the Ionarts children have always enjoyed attending them - other parents looking for an easy way to introduce young people to the sounds of a live orchestra may find likewise. Miss Ionarts, now in her college years, delighted in seeing a number of children attending in Harry Potter costumes. Released in 2010, this installment of the Harry Potter film series was a bit too frightening for Miss Ionarts back then, and there were still a couple jump scares that had their intended effect even now.

Alexandre Desplat composed the score, making use of themes first created for the series by John Williams. With Desplat's more pedestrian music, it is not exactly a score-driven cinematic experience like the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars films. Guest conductor Constantine Kitsopoulos, aided by the metronomic click track projected on the podium, lined things up just fine with the orchestra, but there were few genuine musical frissons to be experienced. Principal cellist David Hardy stood out for his eloquent solos in the closing act of the movie, for sad scenes I will not spoil, but most of the audience's cheers were sparked by memorable lines or actions from the characters on screen, rather than by the orchestra seated beneath it on stage.

Emil de Cou returns to conduct the NSO in Elmer Bernstein's classic score - complete with ondes Martenot (!) - for the screening of Ghostbusters 8 p.m. this Friday. wolftrap.org