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| Yuja Wang at Salzburg |
Sadly I wasn't able to attend the Salzburg Festival this year, but we have a pretty good overview from Jay Nordlinger at the New Criterion.
The playing of a late Schubert sonata by Arcadi Volodos is almost as regular at the Salzburg Festival as Jedermann, the play by Hofmannsthal. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was one of the founders of the festival, in 1920. Every year, his Jedermann—a treatment of the medieval English morality play Everyman—is staged.
Volodos, the Soviet-born pianist, does not play a late Schubert sonata every year, but almost. Does it make any sense to refer to “late Schubert,” given that the composer died at thirty-one? I think so. These are profound, transcendental works in the final stage of a brief but magnificent composing career.
In the very first Salzburg Festival I atttended, as a student, Alfred Brendel played all the Schubert sonatas in several recitals.
In recent years, Teodor Currentzis, the Greek Russian conductor, has become a fixture at the festival. This summer, he led his Utopia Orchestra, and its associated choir, in a concert, which included the Brahms Requiem. He also led them, and other forces, in an opera: Bizet’s Carmen. Was it Bizet’s? That is probably a matter of dispute.
The overture, I have never heard better. The music exploded off the instruments—in a stylish, agreeable way. Unrushed, it had exceptional verve and allure. Currentzis is a conductor like few others. He wakes a person up, and shows the hidden possibilities of the music at hand. (Leonard Bernstein did much the same.) Currentzis goes without a baton, sometimes fluttering his fingers, in the Furtwängler manner. In the opera pit, he had some of his players stand, when they were playing solos.
One of the finest concerts I have ever seen at Salzburg was Currentzis conducting an all-Rameau evening.
Like András Schiff, Yuja Wang, the Chinese pianist, did not announce her program in advance. She wanted to allow for spontaneity or to create mystery—or something. Unlike Schiff, she never announced her program at all—from the stage or anywhere else. She simply sat down at the piano, looked at the computer tablet on her music rack, and played one piece after another. She played twenty-one pieces in all, over the course of an hour and forty-five minutes, with no intermission. She might as well have been at home, playing through some of her favorite things.
The pieces came in no discernible order. They certainly did not come in the chronological. To begin, she played pieces by Satie, Chopin, Scarlatti, Glass, Gubaidulina, Ravel, and Adès.
Unlike in North America, nobody chats with the audience at Salzburg, something I am grateful for.
One of the operas in concert this summer was Der Prinz von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg), by Hans Werner Henze, composed in the late 1950s. Henze was a German who died in 2012 at the age of eighty-six. His opera is based on a play by Heinrich von Kleist, written in about 1810. The story involves war, honor, clemency. Henze meant his opera to be a statement against militarism, but interpretation is up to the individual. Der Prinz von Homburg is a political drama, a family drama, and a psychodrama.
Henze’s score is an outstanding example of his musical intellect. The music sounds like the story, from singers and orchestra alike. It is composed in “tonal-sounding atonality,” to borrow a phrase from Lorin Maazel, the late conductor. It is often fantastical, dreamlike. Every page of the score is marked by intelligence.
These are little bits from four concerts in the Festival. When I go for three weeks, I go to fourteen or fifteen concerts. This is still just a mere sampling of the Festival which comprises some one hundred and sixty concerts. The Vienna Philharmonic is the "house" orchestra for all the opera productions but they also do five concerts of which the last time I was there I attended a transcendent Bruckner 8 conducted by Ricardo Muti. There are several guest orchestras, including this year the Berlin Philharmonic, Le Concert d‘Astrée, Budapest Festival Orchestra, ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, Utopia (Currenzis' personal orchestra), Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. There were also nine opera productions. Recitals included Yuja Wang, but also Grigory Sokolov, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Evgeny Kissin, Arcadi Volodos, Alexander Malofeev, András Schiff, Igor Levitt and a violin and piano recital by Isabelle Faust Violin and Kristian Bezuidenhout Harpsichord. Pretty much all the A-list pianists in the world.
There are lots of other things as well, lieder recitals, a whole Mozart series every weekend by the Mozarteum Orchestra, some very creative chamber music, choral concerts, live theater and so on. You can't possibly attend them all.
The schedule for the 2027 Festival comes out in December.
