On the Road

 As I have done a few times recently, I will be flying to Salzburg next week to take in the music festival. After a couple of recovery days, the first concert will be on July 26th with Jordi Savall conducting vocal soloists, choir and orchestra in music by MICHEL-RICHARD DELALANDE, MARC-ANTOINE CHARPENTIER, and ARVO PÄRT. This is the first of two concerts of largely early music I will be hearing, the second being Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter Ensemble in works by Dowland and Purcell. I've never heard Pärt in concert before, nor Charpentier and Delalande for that matter!

There have been a lot of changes in the programming since I was a student in Salzburg in the 1980s. Back then they did a lot of integral series: Alfred Brendel doing all the Schubert piano sonatas in several concerts and the Alban Berg Quartet doing all the Beethoven string quartets. They also had some living composers. Then, Stockhausen (who presented seven concerts of his chamber music) and Lutosławski who conducted his then new violin concerto. Nowadays they have a "focus" on a particular modern composer, this year Schoenberg.

Also, they used to have more conventional chamber music, i.e. string quartets. This year, I think there is just one, but they have a lot of pianists. I have tickets to see six outstanding pianists: Levit, Sokolov, Simard, Kissing, Volodos and Kantorow.

This year I have several free days so I am going to explore more non-musical things like enjoy a visit to the Augustiner Bräustübl a brewery/restaurant founded in 1621 and still using the traditional recipe. Mind you, that is far from the oldest religious institution in Salzburg--by nearly a thousand years! St. Peter's Abbey, founded in 696, is considered the oldest monastery still in existence in the German-speaking world. The Benedictine monks don't have a brewery, but they do have a bakery. Lots of remarkable non-religious institutions as well. The Hotel Sacher has two branches, one in Vienna and one in Austria and both serve the famous Sachertorte.

I will be blogging every day, I hope, so if you want to come along, just drop by. I will try and post a lot more photos this year. And now we have to pretty much end with Salzburg's most famous resident, Mozart. Here is the Camerata Salzburg with the Symphony no. 40:

No conductor.