Now that I'm back home and have recovered from jet lag and a bad cold and caught up with work, I can contemplate this year's excursion to the Salzburg Festival. This is the third festival I have attended, though I was a student at the Mozarteum in the 1980s and attended a few concerts.
Inevitably this year was less of a sheer thrill than the first one in 2019 or the second in 2021. This is partly due to exposure and partly due to some internal chemistry I am still thinking about. I am a more seasoned festival-goer now, of course. I can find my seats and I know my way to the various venues and I have a smattering of understanding of the Salzburg bus system. So now, I guess, the problem is deciding which concerts to attend--eight months beforehand! The operas are nowadays the big show at Salzburg and it is always a bit of a crap-shoot--unless you have insider knowledge. I made one good choice, Don Giovanni, and one bad choice Der Idiot. Mind you, the critical consensus went the other way, which is not that important. Two of the concerts I most wanted to attend, Currenzis' of the Matthew Passion and the Berlin Philharmonic, were both outside of the time-span I was allowed. I did not choose a couple of operas that might have been very exciting, the Prokofiev for one. But I think I covered the piano recitals quite well--I saw six out of the eight major recitals.
I'm not sure of what I feel about this year's festival--that might have to wait a couple of months. But I can say that the Vienna Philharmonic doing Bruckner was an experience of a lifetime and the piano recitals by Levit, Sokolov, Aimard and Volodos were transcendental. The De profundis by Arvo Pärt was deeply moving and the production of Don Giovanni was absolutely delightful. Some of the other concerts felt more like work than pleasure.
Just for fun, here is Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing a Ligeti etude:
10 comments:
Glad you got home in one piece. I very much enjoyed reading your "dispatches from Salzburg" this year. I'm rather envious.
Thanks so much, cnb. It was my hope that some readers would enjoy visiting Salzburg via the Music Salon. I hope you can attend one year.
I enthusiastically second this.
I certainly enjoyed reading the posts. The piano recitals sounded particularly interesting and quite different to what we get here (length-wise most of all).
Are your piano recitals typically shorter? One thing you can count on with Salzburg--it is aimed at the hard-core classical audience!
Between 1 1/2 and 2 hours usually. Rarely more; sometimes less in certain venues. It's the same with most concerts.
There are plans underway to build a new, small chamber venue, Bechstein Hall, which will only have one-hour concerts, I think mostly so as to give ample time to eat (restaurants close early in London, so it's a real problem for those wanting to fit in a meal), but also because there's the idea now that audiences prefer shorter. Not for me. I love the idea of 3 hour recital.
I think that most of the piano recitals at Salzburg were under two hours--the exceptions being Sokolov because of the encores and Aimard because of the long program.
Ah right, my mistake.
Enjoyed the Salzburg reports, thanks Bryan.
Glad to hear, Patrick!
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