Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 9 )

Festival Orchestra Premiere - Glitter and Be Gay

I am in beautiful Dresden – home of my favorite sweet, the Dominostein (aka The Poor Man's Belgian Chocolates)¹ – for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-joys, Malkovichean divertissement, Bach despairs and delights, Thielemann’s Bruckner, a triple-bill of violinists, a Princess’ opera re-premiere, and a rare Honegger treat, it was time for the premiere performance of the spanking new Dresden Festival Orchestra.

The band – assembled from HIP orchestras all around Europe, with Giuliano Carmignola as deluxe concertmaster and Ivor Bolton as music director– is so new, it still had that new orchestra smell. That manifested itself in the inability to give encores – demanded by a roaring crowd – beyond repeating movements from what had just been performed… courtesy the perfect equivalence of repertoire and works presented.

The Dresden Festival Orchestra is vaguely placed in the early tradition of the Dresden Court Chapel which ultimately became the modern-day Staatskapelle Dresden. Its history bears riches for uncountable concerts to come, being associated with composers, violinists, and directors like Heinrich Schütz, Johann Georg Pisendel, Jan Dismas Zelenka (the “Dresden Bach”), Johann Paul von Westhoff, Johann David Heinichen, Johann Adolph Hasse, and Johann Gottlieb Naumann.

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Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 8 )

Honegger Delights

I am in beautiful Dresden – home of the oldest paddle steamer fleet– for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-joys, Malkovichean divertissement, Bach despairs and delights, Thielemann’s Bruckner, a triple-bill of violinists, and a Princess’ opera re-premiere it was time for a Gergiev sighting, a time-honored event that has become a tradition at music festivals around the world, sometimes – purportedly – concurrently.

A.Honegger, Cello Concert et al., C.Poltéra / T.Ollila / Malmö SO BIS R.Strauss, Ein Heldenleben, Christian Thielemann DG

At the Semper Oper with his Mariinsky Orchestra, Gergiev first churned out the concert version of Béla Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin. Magically, with a few incoherent flicks of his wrist, the orchestra’s wheels started whirring right away, and the winds and brass were variously taking bites out of the music. Soon director and band were making a stupendous noise… a racket high-octane, low on character. It set the stage for what is one of the few classical pieces that can make you feel sticky afterwards: A good interpretation will see blood, sweat, and not-tears on the floor, once the titular Mandarin his been climactically dispatched. This particular one was rich in body liquids, and any lack of nuance didn’t bother me.

It bothered me much more in the official meat of the event, Strauss’ Heldenleben which occupied the concert’s second half. The result was a superficially appreciable but a disoriented mess – the thing that happens if you have all the notes but are lacking a map. If they had played the Alpine Symphony, they would have gotten to a peak alright, and with valleys all around to hear about it loud and clear. Alas it would have been the wrong summit.

Apart from outright baffling rhythmical choices and some shoddy ensemble work, it seemed the players’ lack of empathy for phrasing that tanked Strauss. Each phrase in Strauss (much like Mahler or any classical music that relies on folk inflections), however sappy, is densely filled with emotional content that leans one way or the other. Like Nietzschean aphorisms, they present keys to much bigger universes of flavor than cannot be contained in the notes (or letters) alone. Mere correct playing of what’s in the score can’t begin to tell the story.

That left the highlight of the evening right where the Festival Intendant Jan Vogler might have wanted it to stay: On his performance of the Arthur Honegger Cello Concerto. Or rather: the performance of the Honegger Cello Concerto, because it really wasn’t so much Jan Vogler’s playing that was the main ingredient of selective delight, but his programming of it. His performance betrayed the many hours spent in the office, organizing the Festival. But with his resonant full tone, rich in the lower registers and a bit like a baying elk, Vogler took the lyrical, beautiful concerto out for a ride that affirmed its would-be status as a 20^th century masterpiece if only it were better known. The concerto takes a beautiful bent through realms of calm, then energetic-stubbing, then relentlessly angular, and finally the lyrical again. Along its way the 1929 concerto hits upon an easy elegance that won’t be heard again until certain film scores of the 40s or 50s. Programming and performing it was a musicians’ job, and if the number of those who appreciated it was a little smaller than that of those who loved the Strauss, there is the likely probability that they appreciated it all the more.

Picture of Gergiev & Vogler courtesy Dresden Music Festival, © Oliver Killig

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 7 )

Operatic Repremiere

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of the coaster– for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-joys, Malkovichean divertissement, Bach despairs and delights, Thielemann’s Bruckner, and a triple-bill of violinists, it was time for the re-premiere of a royal opera.

Princess Amalie of Saxony (1794-1870) was by all accounts an eager student of music and a successful writer of light plays. Her tutors included Carl Maria von Weber (only eight years her senior), and you could read his diary entry about his royal student in any number of ways: “[Princess Amalie] has a beautiful talent and admirable diligence.” Once you’ve heard her long-lost opera “La casa disabitata” (The Uninhabited House), a one-act Farsa unperformed for 177 years, you’re more likely to know how he might have meant it.

There’s nothing wrong with the very charming overture in which the Princess strings together a series of well-formed conventional phrases. At their best they amount to occasional touches of Spohr, within otherwise plain classical flair. The “Phrase-A, repeat – Phrase B, repeat – Phrase A, Phrase B, repeat, repeat” approach is not unusual for music of her time – or rather music before her time, since the prudent rest is like lesser Cimarosa all the way home, and if there was any hint Rossini in there, it wasn’t the good kind. Easily patronized, darling stuff this is; a pleasant 100-minute divertissement that would go down well if iced drinks were served during the performance and if one could lounge on comfy ottomans. The Russian archive that still owns the vocal parts (they were ‘protected’ from Germans after World War II) only allowed one concert-performance (broadcast on August 11^th on Deutschlandradio Kultur), but then maybe it’s enough to dig this uninhabited house out only every 177 years.

The Italian libretto, written by the Princess, is a little clunky. In the name of efficiency, I’ll try to convey its lack of eloquence by rhyming the synopsis:

This flat, so says a sign, is free!
The People gather mightily,
“Just how”, they wonder, “can this be?
Should I say yes, the joke’s on me??”


Eu•stich•io studied Lit-Ra-Ture,
And nat’rally he is rather poor.
“Free”! It’s what I can afford!
And my old wife will be on board.


A caveat: A ghost lives here!
E. has a gun, so what the hell,
He deftly manages his fear…
'Til midnight rings the bell.


Callisto, butler, saucy chap,
Followed orphan-rescue with kid-nap,
He locks her up and feeds her Schnitzel,
He’s, if you will, an early Fritzl.


The girl, her name’s Anetta,
Won’t marry him, that cad.
Raimondo would be so much bettuh,
(He’s the owner of the pad.)


At night Anetta runs away,
And after some discussion can convey,
She’s not a ghost per se,
Euastchio takes her on her way.


Sinforosa (wife, no money, aged)
Feels jealously enraged.
Callisto shows - as ghost disguised...
Gets shot, found out, and then despised.


The scheme is up, the truth emerges
A happy-end ensues for all
Raimondo and Anetta satisfy their urges –
And Eustichio: He gets rent-control!

The Dresden Chapel Soloists under Helmut Branny did their merry best and the cast of singers was overqualified throughout: Ilhun Jung, the eager, brazen baritone as Don Raimondo, the ever professional bass-baritone Allen Boxer as Callisto, the delightfully goofy, light baritone Matthias Henneberg with his clean, strong, dramatically anodyne voice in the main part of Eutichio, Anja Zügner’s bright and chirpy Annetta, Tehila Nini Goldstein’s Sinforosa, whose melted into her bits of music and was a real pleasure on the ears, and everyone else. The atmosphere was helped considerably by the surroundings of the Summer Palace in Dresden’s Großer Garten, easily the most charming of the many venues that the Dresden Festival uses.

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 6 )

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of the (mass produced) tea bag– for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-joys, Malkovichean divertissement, Bach despairs and delights, and Thielemann’s Bruckner, it was time for a day of variety with, depending how you count, up six concerts.

All You Can Hear

It started with the “All You Can Hear” event at Dresden’s convention center. A promising and interesting concept with Kristian Järvi, the MDR Symphony Orchestra and the (strangely German) Baltic Youth Philharmonic (BYP)… an series of performances that vaguely suggested an open floor plan, a variety of different concerts (orchestral and chamber) to chose from, and active exploration on the part of the visitor who paid a one-time fee of 20,- got a stamp, and was then free to roam.

Except that when you got there, assuming you found the place on your first attempt, there was hearty little roaming, no open floor plan, and no concurrent concerts to hear. Reality proved pernickety on this first attempt at an ambitious and vastly intriguing concept and in the end it turned out a succession of regular concerts in semi-suitable spaces that no one was allowed to enter late, and during which people sat still to reverently listen to the music (including full observance of the ironclad “don’t-clap-between-movements-even-when-it’s-obvious-that-the-first-movement-is-eliciting-applause” rule)… only that they sat in rafters in a convention center hall, rather than on the cushioned seats of a concert hall.

Give the project thick carpets, creak-free seating, curtains instead of doors, parallel musical events, more open minds, and willing, enthusiastic, inexpensive participants (the BYP seems a good place to start) and something wonderful might come of that yet in years to come. The mixed audience was already there, from different social and economic strata, including a legion of tots that were ill advisedly fitted with little DIY-garden-hose French horns. Instruments that proved wonderfully effective in the reverberant halls. “Toooot, tooooooot!” they went, though far enough from the hermetically sealed concert spaces, to do any damage beyond the nerves of innocent bystanders and regretful mothers.

Palace of Culture?

If falling short of its own ambitions, the “All You Can Hear” thing was at least an opportunity to hear a fine Korngold Violin Concerto with Vadim Gluzman (and BYP), a really quite stupendous Beethoven Eighth with the MDR SO, all under Kristian Järvi, and the realization that for all its aesthetic limitations and acoustic difficulties, the convention’s center halls make a better venue for an orchestral concert than the city’s official performing space, the concert hall of the 1969 architectural and ideological sin of the Kulturpalast, Dresden’s “Palace of Culture”. Since the place, home of the spirit of Walter Ulbrich, is unfathomably protected as a listed landmark site, only a merciful fire might one day help the Dresden Philharmonic to a concert hall that underscores, not undermines its value.

There might be better orchestras in smaller cities, and better ‘second’ orchestras in bigger cities. But by that mix of quality and reputation that make the amorphous status of an orchestra, the Dresden Philharmonic is easily the best ‘junior orchestra’ of a city the size of Dresden. That knowledge didn’t help during Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto with an engaged Vadim Repin and Markus Poschner conducting, because you couldn’t hear very much from the seats I had, and what I heard sounded as seductive as Tango-dancing by numbers. Whether the thing ever came together on stage is questionable, if so, it didn’t reach me. A pity, too, because the preceding Coriolan Overture somehow did, and that was a most enjoyable performance. Not the fresh and exciting quality of the MDR’s convention center Beethoven, but well played and with enough promise to make the prospect of staying for Beethoven’s Seventh attractive.

Bartók Beneath the Conveyor Belt

Still, with the third movement of Prokofiev not getting better even as it was encored, it seemed prudent to move on to Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory, the spotless, Canadian maple hardwood floor production facility for VW’s Phaeton luxury sedan. It’s a fascinating place and even if the sales numbers for the Phaeton were better than they are, it’s understandable that VW – a main sponsor of the Festival – is very eager to show the place off in imaginative ways.

It’s certainly memorable to hear a program of Moldavian - Hungarian - Romanian folk-influenced works amidst five-and-a-half ton luxury vehicles in various states of un-finish, hanging on telescoping trapezoids from the ceiling’s conveyor belt. The mind raced to future productions of Die Walküre or the possibilities to stage B. A. Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. Instead the Kopatchinsky family turned up, famous violinist daughter Patricia (with a terrific Beethoven Concerto as part of her ever-increasing discography) up front, violinist mother Emilia and the cimbalom playing father Viktor in tow. A dapper buddy on double bass provided for the groove in Eastern European, Moldovan folk music larks that opened and closed the recital. I find the charade of really letting lose in such a concert, as properly suggested by such music, always an awkward affair. Especially in front of a (German) classical music audience… But there was no denying that it brought fresh air into a recital that came close to suffering from anoxia at several points.

Not during the Bartók Romanian Folk Dances though; those were played as well as I’ve ever heard. Partly thanks to Mihaela Ursuleasa’s pianism, but mostly because it was endowed by Kopatchinkskaja with the requisite seediness, that bit of musical lace that alluringly, suggestively hangs half of one shoulder… the complete confidence of knowing what she was doing, the ability to do it, and a thankfully shameless joy in sharing it. Which is really just the roundabout way of suggesting that it was authenticity that made the Bartók.¹

György Kurtág’s Eight Duos for Violin and Cimbalom (op.4) tested my love for Kurtág, its pp glissandi softer sounding than the factory’s incessant AC. Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane – even in such a coy and wicket-wily performance – is a work I’ve always suspected of appealing more to violinists than their audiences, and while George Enescu’s Third Violin Sonata (on Popular Romanian themes) is one of the great works of its kind, I wish that the composer had made two sonatas from it. The first movement opens with a magnificent lilting lament but in connection with the Andante sostenuto it punishes any lack of concentration on the listener – before the third movement, just as long but subjectively brief, injects much-needed oxygen back into the affair.





¹ As opposed to the airs other performers might put on when emulating such music’s spirit, which causes little more than vicarious embarrassment. There are various musical examples (Dieskau as Pappageno comes to my mind), but really the best analogy are male Russian figure skaters after the collapse of the Soviet Union who bought leather trousers and rocked out on ice, to cringe-worthy effect and music ranging from Bill Haley to Tom Jones. Or the most brilliant counter-cultural film maker of East Germany, Gregor Voss, and his first trip to the West.

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 5 )

Dresden's Bruckner and their Thielemann

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of the coffee filter – for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-joys, Malkovichean divertissement, Bach despairs and delights, it was time for a concert of the Dresden Staatskapelle – the musical crown jewel of this musically well endowed city – under their new music director Christian Thielemann.

The intelligent program that night took place at the Summer Palace in Dresden’s Großer Garten where Pierre-Laurent Aimard performed a clever medley of Schubert, Kurtág, Liszt and Ligeti. But sometimes brains are not as important as looks – or rather sound – and Thielemann in Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony with his orchestra is too promising, too beautiful, to centrally “Dresden”, and ultimately too prestigious to miss. Especially when the point of the stay in Dresden is to get a big whiff of Saxonia.

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Bach, Death, and Antihistamines

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 4 )

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of magnetic tape – for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-delight, Bach-despair, and Malkovichean divertissement, it was time for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Ian Bostridge to showcase Bach in Dresden’s bombed-out and privately [!], recently re-built Frauenkirche.

The splendor of the ornately catholic-looking Frauenkirche is almost too neat, too clean, to develop all its potentially astonishing effect. There is a hint of artificiality about it in our minds, because the aesthetic of the new is incongruent with our expectations of the historic. Habit has turned the ravages of time, historical wear and tear, an essential, rather than incidental element of anything historic. Not unlike we believe, despite knowing better, that both World Wars were fought in black and white, and how it just feels right that Greek statues appear elegantly white, hewn of pure marble – rather than in their original garish colors.

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Sex, Lies, and Mozart Arias

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 3 )

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of milk chocolate – for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Mozart-delight and Bach-despair, it was time for something completely different:

The Infernal Comedy, Malkovich, Haselböck et al. ArtHaus DVD The Giacomo Variations, Malkovich, Haselböck et al. ArtHaus DVD

John Malkovich is Jack Unterweger, innocent mass murderer, world famous in Austria [sic], back from the dead, and on a publicity tour for his tell-all-or-does-it biography. But John Malkovich is also being John Malkovich (pun hard to avoid), capricious actor, on tour with a Viennese baroque orchestra performing the morbid musical comedy “The Infernal Comedy”. For a while there is a deliberate ambivalence between the characters, which contributes to the hard-to-pin-down quality of the show. Whether that’s good or bad would depend on how keen the viewer is on pinning things down hard. Jack Unterweger, with about a dozen sexually assaulted murder-victims to his name, would presumably have been all for pinning down. Creator and director Michael Sturminger, co-creator and conductor Martin Haselböck, and the pivotal Malkovich less so apparently, or else they wouldn’t have brought something on stage (and toured with it for four years) that leaves half the audience wondering what they had just witnessed.

Is “The Infernal Comedy” a play with applied music? Is the music integral or incidental? Do they demand each other; does one improve the other hierarchically (like whisky improving a cigar, but a cigar not improving whisky), or is it arranged for mutual benefit? Is it a dubiously efficient ploy to get people into the theater and listen to beautiful but obscure (and a few famous) classical and baroque arias that interactively alter with the ‘chapters’ of Malkovich-Unterweger’s story? “Sposa son disprezzata” (Vivaldi, Ottone in Villa) “Berenice, che fai” (from Haydn’s dramatic cantata Scena di Berenice), Carl Maria von Weber’s patchwork aria for an Étienne Méhul opera, “Ah, se Edmundo fosse l’uccisor” are all magnificent to hear, and Martene Grimson—one of the two sopranos that are part of the play—was delectable in Vivaldi and Weber and Beethoven’s “Ah perfido!”. Sophie Klußmann, substituting for the other soprano of the cast, managed her vocal and scenic duties admirably, too – whether she was being strangled, molested by Malkovich’s lusty-disturbed Unterweger, or singing Gluck and Mozart. The scraggy, committed Vienna Academy Orchestra was a delight, buzzing through the music with a transparency that brought out voices within the music that are all too often hidden by smooth homophony.

Amid this, Malkovich (who has done several projects that combine classical music and theater since the inception of this production) went through concentric circles of contrivance with a Pepé Le Pew routine in pseudo-Austrian accent (strategic mispronunciations alternating with eloquent runs of idiomatic American) and the slight difference that he didn’t just want to smooch his Penelope, but strangle her with her own brassiere. (A tragic end for any pussy.) Are we not entertained? Most of the audience seemed sufficiently engrossed with these “confessions of a serial killer”: drawn in by the enigmatic presence of Malkovich’s creepy predator and entertained by terrific music.

Picture of John Malkovich courtesy Dresden Music Festival, © Stephan Floss

Notes from the 2012 Dresden Music Festival ( 2 )

I am in beautiful Dresden – birthplace of the toothpaste – for the annual three-week Music Festival that has taken place since 1978. After Kristian Bezuidenhout’s very attractive Mozart recital on my first night here, I was headed for another concert that had all the makings of an absolute highlight: an all Bach recital on the historic Silbermann organ in Dresden’s Katholische Hofkirche, the Catholic Church of the Royal Court of Saxony that the catholic ruler had built, to achieve ecclesiastic balance as the protestant townspeople put their efforts into building the Frauenkirche.

I’m highly susceptible to all-Bach in a church, and when I heard Pieter van Dijk in the Oslo Cathedral earlier this year, it was all quiet ecstasy and elation. With the historic instrument in the back and the church’s white walls cast in the evening sun’s friendly warm light, the ears were perked and the tear ducts prepared. What a shame then that Martin Haselböck’s recital merited only tears of anguish, and perhaps worry for the instrument¹. Haphazard and inept, the program seemed like an hour-long meditation on the sufferings of innocent Johann Sebastian Bach, played at speeds considerably faster than Haselböck’s fingers, and with the music well ahead of the rhythm throughout.

J.S.Bach, Organ Works, performed on Silbermann Organs Berlin Classics

The apocryphal but too-famous-not-to-be-by-Bach Toccata & Fugue in d-minor BWV 556 ran away as soon as it started, never to be caught up with again. The fugue was, as almost everything else in this recital, a bloody mess with no chance whatsoever for Bach’s invariably compelling rhythmic force to strike. The six Schübler Chorales (BWV 645-650) were devoid of any spiritual element whatsoever, just a race to the finish and so bungled along the way that during “Kommst du nun, Jesu” it sounded as though a long defunct part of the organ got in a tangle and played bits back, with a ten second delay and a tone much like the croaking hoot of a dented fire truck. A gentleman with an increasingly worried look next to me inquired under his breath whether the noise came from the instrument. One was afraid, that yes, it did. It was, in a way, like involuntarily witnessing the slow implosion of instrument, or performer, or Bach, or all three. There is little point in pointing out brief moments of respite and competence during the Adagio-Grave of the C-major Toccata (BWV 564), which lasted for half a minute before Haselböck tripped himself up again – much like he did in the very briefly promising beginning of the Partite diverse sopra il Corale, “Sei gegrüßet, Jesu gütig” (BWV 768). If Haselböck had only just pressed the requisite notes down all at once, the concert would have been considerably more efficient, mercifully shorter, and frankly not much worse.

Gottfried Silbermann died 259 years ago whilst working on his organ at the Hofkirche. In a way he was dying all over again, last night.

¹ That particular worry proved unfounded; the next day the church’s regular organist produced a beautiful mid-day recital of Bach & beyond, open to all.

All photos author's own