More about Austria

Here's a funny thing: Austrians don't talk to one another--much. I was just in a supermarket for a few minutes and the whole time the only conversation I heard was a few words between a customer and the meat guy. That's it. Lining up at the cash with three or four other customers and the cashier, no words were exchanged. Nothing other than the cashier stating the total owing. This would not happen in Mexico. Walking into the store, if you passed someone greetings might be exchanged and certainly people would be talking to one another throughout the store and absolutely the cashier would greet you as you stepped up and say a farewell as you left. This is normal. But in Austria it would, apparently, be unusual.

People accuse Mexicans of not being readers and this is true--at least you never see anyone reading anything, even a newspaper, in public. And certainly not an actual book. But they do constantly chat with one another. And if you pass a stranger in the street away from the center of town, you certainly say hello. If you walk into a restaurant you will certainly be greeted--by name if you are a regular. But Austrians are a taciturn lot.

The water however is fantastic: some of the purest water on earth, it comes right from glacial melt. All the lakes are pure and full of fish that are good to eat. Quite a contrast from Mexico which has one rather polluted lake and one little river in the south. Yes, where I live there is something we call a river, but as nearly all the year it consists of about two inches of barely moving water, I hardly think it counts.

And Austrian bathrooms are mostly really good. Modern, high-tech facilities. And no hunting for light switches--you walk in, the lights go on. Just like escalators. They start moving as soon as you approach.

And for lunch you can have a really big sausage:

That's a bratwurst with fried potatoes and onion mustard

Weird and nice things about Austria

One particularly annoying thing about both large corporations and highly developed nations is that they tend to become parasitic. They are always assessing you little extra charges, fees and taxes to drain away your life-blood. Or that's how it feels! Two examples, Lufthansa now charges you about $50 US for every checked piece of luggage. Both ways. And Austria charges €1.75 for each day you are in a hotel or AirBnb. This is just a little extra added on top of the multitude of other taxes.

The excuse for this is, of course, that the large corporation and highly developed state is taking care of you in some way, i.e. taking responsibility for parts of your life. Which, when you think about it is really just taking over parts of your life. An opinion writer in Canada before I left called this being a "junior partner in your own life!" Yep, pretty much.

The reason this bugs me is that Mexico is not like this. You are responsible for yourself. If you trip and fall into a hole, people nearby will be likely to assist you, but the government will not be interested.

Ok, what else? There is an old-money upper class here that you see at the opera in particular. Tall, slim extremely well-dressed women over six feet tall and fleshy, suspiciously tanned men in very flashy clothes that have the demeanor of mafia godfathers. And then there are the more rustic, earthy, very plainly dressed men that you find driving taxis.

 Austrians are quite fit; you rarely see anyone really overweight. And all sorts of middle-aged and elderly men and women are getting around riding bicycles. These things may be connected.

Time for a nice item: Salzburg has a remarkably well-developed and efficient bus system. There seem to be over 200 lines and the busses run about every 15 minutes during the day and every 20 minutes in the evening--and usually until midnight. Buying tokens is very easy. There is a machine that dispenses them at the bus stop. You can press a button to have the menu in English. Instructions are clear and simple. You pay with a credit card and your selected token along with a receipt is delivered instantly. I got a 24 hour token for €3.90 and used it for four trips.

One of the most dangerous places you can be is between a woman of a certain age and a glass of Sekt. I've been elbowed and shoved a few times.

Of course, just the names of streets can be strange. Here are the directions I had to follow to walk from my AirBnb to the nearest bus stop: right on Jodok-Fink-Straße, 72 m then left on Glockengießerstraße, .1 km then right on Michael-Filzgasse, 92 m left on Innsbrucker B, .2 km, slight right, then 53 m right on Maxglaner Hauptstraße.

Ending on a nice item: I quite like food in Austria. In the supermarket are an incredible selection of cold cuts, all of them tasty. The fruit and vegetables--especially tomatoes--are excellent. The milk--alpine milk!--is lovely. Whenever I come to Austria the first thing I want to do is head to a restaurant and order a wienerschnitzel, which is a lot like a chicken milanesa in Mexico, but with veal. But actually it tastes very different. Served with cranberry sauce. That little white nylon bag contains a quarter lemon so when you squeeze it over your schnitzel, you don't get lemon in your eye and the seeds don't drop on your food.

But yesterday I discovered a new dish: Gekochter Tafelspitz, a very traditional Austrian dish of slow boiled beef brisket. Here is the presentation:

Gekochter Tafelspitz

Sorry about the lighting! I was facing a big window. How it is served is first they place the large plate on the table with just the fried potatoes and a bed of creamed spinach (the green stuff). Then they place some pieces of beef on the spinach with some of the stock and the julienned vegetables. This comes from the bowl on the right. There is lots more for you to serve yourself. On the left is a small plate with two small bowls; these contain apple horseradish and chive sauce for the beef. The whole thing is just a delight. I had it with a glass of Zweigelt wine, Austria's answer to Pinot Noir.

Salzburg, Day 6, Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and Jupiter Ensemble

 

Desandre, Dunford and Jupiter

UPDATE: I put this up rather early in the morning and I didn't provide enough context. This concert is by Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and the Ensemble Jupiter. The first half was devoted to songs and instrumental pieces by John Dowland, the English lutenist and composer, and the second half to music by Henry Purcell.

Since you are not allowed to take photos during the concert and the photos I take afterwards are poor due to the low light levels and since the Festival sends out an email with an excellent photo for every concert (along with homework, sometimes), I'm just going to use these excellent photos.

In contrast to the Don Giovanni performance where I was barely qualified to attend the performance, let alone comment on it, I am highly qualified to comment on this performance. I not only know this repertoire, I have been performing it for nearly fifty years, longer, that is, than the artists on stage last night. But not nearly as well, let me hasten to add!

I have to make one technical comment up front: I am troubled by Thomas Dunford's practice of crossing his legs while he plays. He can certainly do this, with great success, and he uses a fabric strap to make it more stable. But the problem is, I am pretty sure that in the long term, i.e. decades from now, it may give him a bad case of sciatica. I have some sciatica in my left leg from using a foot rest to play guitar with, which is why I changed to a guitar rest that allows me to have both feet flat on the floor. About half of the younger guitarists these days are doing the same. But on to the concert.

The Canto Lirico series consists of three concerts, this one and two others with different artists later in August with vocal repertoire. The title of this program is Songs of Passion and from the very first song, an irony was revealed. "Come again: sweet love doth now invite" from The First Booke of Songes or Ayres of 1597 by John Dowland is a song I know well. In my score library at home is my transcription for guitar that I made some fifty years ago. The thing about Elizabethan texts is that they often reveal a bawdy side and that is especially true of this song. I remember being shocked to discover, on reading an excellent book titled Shakespeare's Bawdy by Eric Partridge, that virtually everything the Nurse says in Romeo and Juliet is actually a sexual pun.

Here is the first verse of "Come again: sweet love doth now invite"

Come again: sweet love doth now invite,

Thy graces, that refrain,

To do me due delight,

To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,

With thee again in sweetest sympathy.

 Just read literally, those are rather odd lyrics. But to Elizabethans everything was quite clear. "Come again" is a reference to orgasm and the line "To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die" is simply how you get there! In Elizabethan slang, "to die" is to have an orgasm. Now that verse makes a great deal more sense. Especially when you notice that the line ending in "to die" is a rising sequence. After I discovered Shakespeare's Bawdy I went through a number of songs by Dowland and others and discovered a host of sexual references. Oh, and if you want to be really accurate, you have to pronounce "sympathy" to rhyme with "die".

But, alas, none of this came across in the performance last night. The tempo of the song was too fast and the eroticism of the words and their musical setting was just not there. In addition, much as I love Lea Desandre, she is not at her best with English pronunciation. The performance had real strengths, of course. They did some interesting variations--for one verse, the strings (two violins, viola, viola da gamba and double bass) joined in singing. The Dowland Ayres are published with vocal and string parts as well as lute accompaniment, so you have various performance options. They also played with different tempi for some verses. All in all it was a very accomplished performance that, alas, missed the boat as to what the song was actually about. Lea Desandre is a terrific singer, but she does not do bawdy well.

After that, I'm afraid, I dozed off for a lot of the first half. The second half was all Purcell and they were much more at home with this music. Desandre does lament very well and the half ended with "Thy hand Belinda" and "When I am laid in earth" from Dido and Aeneas. Much though we loved to make sexual puns on those lyrics in first year music history they are not actually bawdy!

The audience in Salzburg loved the concert and demanded an encore which turned out to be a song composed by lutenist and director Thomas Dunford--a song, in English about how we are all drops in the ocean. It was well-received by the audience and the performers returned for numerous bows. It rather sounded to me like French pop music, but hey...

 Lea Desandre, Thomas Dunford and Ensemble Jupiter are really outstanding musicians and I am in awe of their facility with style and ornamentation. Dunford in particular is terrific at ripping off garlands of divisions on the lute and Desandre can do trills and graces till the cows come home. Their real center of gravity is in French and Italian music, I feel, and they are less at home with English music and especially John Dowland. They don't do somber terribly well.

But I was led to reflect on my own career: the truth is that these folks know how to read a room and give an audience just what they want to hear. And that was something that I was a lot less good at!

Some photos:

Just before the concert, Thomas Dunford popped out to check his tuning

Acknowledging the very enthusiastic applause

The three concert halls on the Karajan-platz all back on the sheer rock of the Mönchsberg

 which we can see here on the west side of the large lobby shared by the Haus für Mozart and the Felsenreitschule.

Two worlds and today's listening

After four hours last night immersed in the highly cultured environment of opera, it was rather a dash of cold water this morning just to glance at the news. The Olympics, especially the opening ceremony with some really unfortunate imagery (you know what I mean), the election in Venezuela, Lebanon, wild fires in Canada and California, the US election news. Well, you get the idea. Sometimes I really wonder where all this is going to end up. And then I am really grateful that we still have Mozart (and the other people).

Salzburg: Day 5, Don Giovanni

Of the two Mozart operas in production this year, I chose Don Giovanni because it is one with which I am the most familiar. The other one is La Clemenza di Tito which I hardly know at all. I have actually played in Don Giovanni years ago--there is a brief mandolin part that accompanies an aria. I noticed last night that Teodor Currenzis had, not only a mandolin in the pit, but also a theorbo and what looked like, from a distance, a Baroque guitar. At intermission I got a shot of the Baroque guitar and mandolin, but not the theorbo, but trust me, it was there (though not very audible).

The orchestra pit at intermission with the mandolin and Baroque guitar chatting.

Let me hasten to say that I can't possibly give a review of this performance! I would have to see it four or five more times, study the score in the arrangement that Teodor Currenzis is using (has created) and probably, just be a lot more wise and informed than I am. It is not often that I walk out of a performance at the end feeling truly inadequate to what I have just seen and heard. But in this case, yes. But I do have some observations about the unique appeal of opera.

Just one of the many surprising images from Don Giovanni

Yes, they really did lower a buggy down to the stage at one point--I'm not sure why! They also lowered a four-door sedan (it might have been a Tesla) as well, nose down, but it just disappeared after a while. At one point a baby grand piano just dropped out of nowhere to crash on the stage (I'm pretty sure that was a special prop because dropping a real baby grand piano twenty or thirty feet would probably just go right through the stage). It made an impressive noise, though. And the remnants were somehow used as the continuo for some recitative. I am only able to share the above image because something new at the festival is that, every day of a performance you have a ticket to, they send you an email ahead of time telling you how long the performance will be, as well as some more information. And a photo.

But let me go back a bit--the opera opens with the curtain going up on the interior of what we realize is a church: there is a large crucifix, some large religious paintings and a number of pews facing away from us, toward the crucifix. Before a note of the overture, ghostly figures in white come and remove all the pews, the crucifix and the paintings. Then the overture starts and, believe it or not, a real goat trots across the stage. That I do know the reason for: the goat is an animal associated with the ancient Greek satyr, half-man, half-goat, a solitary creature driven by lust who is the ancestor of the Don Giovanni character.

Quoting from the hefty program booklet:

The reason why Don Giovanni is a dangerous figure is because he strikes at the heart of a symbolic system by replacing Agape by Eros. And Eros--to paraphrase Georges Bataille--is always close bound up with death. Don Giovanni knows neither remorse nor guilt: in order to satisfy his desires he attacks the Law, discrediting and abrogating it. It is not coincidence that his first act in the opera is the killing of a father--the Father.

But I want to talk a bit about what is so compelling about this and other modern opera productions. It is really about creating illusions to intensify the performance. Some of the ones last night included some remarkable images: a line of fire (real fire) suddenly appearing, crossing half the stage (a very large stage at the Grosses Festspielhaus), a scrim dropping down, turning the whole stage area into a ghostly version of itself (this is enhanced by special lighting), oh, and speaking of lighting, there was one moment that I can barely comprehend: Don Giovanni kicks a bunch of stone fragments across the stage and suddenly the lighting changes so that they, and he, appear to be floating on a plane of oil or something unearthly. I have no idea how they did that, but they did and it was eerie to an extreme.

What makes opera so different is that when we see a special effect in a movie, no matter how well it is done, we know it is just a bunch of pixels that came out of a studio in Hollywood. There is nothing real there. But in an opera production, what we see on stage is actually real: that was a real goat, a real naked woman (or dozens of them at one point), those are real singers singing (without any processing or pitch correction), yes, there are stage props, but they are actual material objects, not pixels and the light is actual light. So the whole experience is entirely different. And, well, to me at least, much more interesting.

At the end of the opera the whole cast comes on stage, starting with the hundred or so women extras used in various scenes. By the time we get to the principal singers, there are two hundred people on stage. That plus the nearly one hundred in the orchestra pit starts to give you an idea of just how enormous a production like this is. And I'm not counting any of the backstage technical staff: designers, carpenters, lighting technicians, stagehands and a host of others--costumers! What does a production like this cost? A fortune! Good thing that the primary sponsor of the Salzburg Festival is Audi.

But no, I simply can't give a review, or even a detailed description of what went on--it was four hours long. But I can say that it was masterfully done and the singing and playing was fantastically accomplished. We are living in a golden age of opera production. And Mozart certainly knew what he was doing!

 

Salzburg: Day 4, Igor Levit

The audience gathers in the Herbert-von-Karajanplatz

The Grosses Festspielhaus before the concert: a photo of an empty concert hall is like an audio recording of a painter's brushes in their jar!

Igor Levit, despite his youth, is a distinguished artist with many honors including 2020 Gramophone  Artist of the Year. In 2022 his Shostakovich album ON DSCH was BBC Music Magazines Recording of the year. I saw him here three years ago in the smaller Haus für Mozart, but last night he was in the big hall, the Grosses Festspielhaus and it was oversold! They had approximately seventy extra chairs placed on the wings of the stage and I didn't see an empty seat in the house.

The program consisted of the Chromatic  Fantasy and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903 by Bach, the Six Piano Pieces op 118 by Brahms and, in the second half, Liszt's piano arrangement of the Symphony No. 7 by Beethoven. This last was the show-stopper, a stunningly virtuosic achievement by both Liszt and Levit. It was so strange to hear this very familiar symphony transformed on the piano, as Liszt himself suggested, like an engraving of a painting with all the light and shade but missing the orchestral color. There was one encore, the Nocturne in C# minor by Chopin.

I saw Igor Levit three years ago and he was very fine then, though I didn't quite find his Mahler Symphony no. 10 transcription entirely convincing. But tonight was a success on many levels and the audience gave a standing ovation. In fact, some stifled clapping broke out after the haunting Allegretto movement of the Beethoven. Clapping between movements is unheard of in Salzburg--normally, but Igor Levit has won a following here.

Salzburg: Day 3, Jordi Savall and a brew pub

 

Entering the Kollegienkirche, notice the banner

I don't think you can read it from this photo, but the banner advertises eight concerts in the Ouverture Spirituelle series. The Salzburg Festival is organized into a number of different series, each of which in a smaller or less-specialized context would be a whole season in itself. There are five other concerts by other ensembles that overlap with this series. Last night was La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Le Concert des Nations with vocal soloists conducted by Jordi Savall. The bio in the program notes that Jordi Savall has been researching, interpreting and performing early music for some fifty years. The two ensembles, choral and orchestral, noted above were both his foundation. The five vocal soloists I won't cover separately, but their performances were lovely with clear, open voices, unstrained and, without pitch correction (of course!), beautifully in tune. I have long been a lover of choral music and this was an evening to treasure. It consisted in two settings of the De profundis (Psalm 130), the first by Michel-Richard Delalande (used as funeral music for Louis XIV in 1715) and the second by the contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Between these two in the program was a Te Deum, an ancient hymn of joyous praise dating all the way back to the fourth century. The composer was Marc-Antoine Carpenter (1643 - 1704), this is one of six Te Deums he composed. There was also an encore but I didn't know the piece--I might be able to find out from the local paper what it was. My feeling was that the best work of the evening, by far, was the Arvo Pärt with its other-worldly textures and pure harmonies. Absolutely a delight. Here is a performance by the Hilliard Ensemble:

Acknowledging applause at concert's end

Before the concert my German friends and I visited one of the stellar attractions of Salzburg: the Augustiner Bräustuben, a brew pub open for the last four hundred years, still using the original recipe.

Original stoneware?

The beer was excellent, but the food was really outstanding. The hilarious thing for me was that my German friends found half the items on the menu incomprehensible because they used uniquely Austrian vocabulary:

Menu in Austrian German

One friend said that the grilled chicken was simply the best she had ever had--I tried it and wow. As with fish, the trick with chicken is not to overcook it. This was moist and unctuous.

Grilled half chicken with potato salad

I had the venison stew with dumpling and green beans with "speck" (a kind of Alpine bacon). Wow, the sauce was made with red wine. Excellent!

Venison stew with dumpling and green beans

So that was an experience to remember. This is the kind of place that welcomes you and that locals treasure. If you are in Salzburg, don't miss it. And you won't find these recipes in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal! If you go, be sure to make a reservation.