The Austrian city in festival time is a strange and wonderful place
Quick word from Salzburg, and a couple of days at the Festival earlier this week taking part in the Preis der Schallplattenkritik's Quartett der Kritiker.
Harrison Birtwistle is one of this year's featured composers (you can read Fiona Maddocks' review of the flagship event of the Birtwistle-residency, a new production of his opera Gawain, in tomorrow's Observer), and his music was the focus of two fabulously engrossing concerts in the Kollegienkirche from Austrian new music ensembles Klangforum Wien and OENM.
Klangforum's performance of the 1984 masterpiece Secret Theatre was a Birtwistlean thrill ride of explosivity and stasis; Sylvain Cambreling conducted with uncompromising precision, energy, and hell-for-leather speeds that pushed his players to their expressive and technical limits. After OENM's performance of the shattering, raw elementality of Verses for Ensemble the night before (a piece that Birtwistle described to me as his vision of a "music before music" and which still sounds primordially rich and strange, 44 years after it was written), Secret Theatre sounded more sophisticated in its essentially joyful play of instrumental theatre, and its complex counterpoint between "cantus and continuum", as Birtwistle describes the two most obvious layers of the music. And yet it never lost - just as Birtwistle's music has never lost - its sense of simultaneous ancientness and coruscating modernity.
One clue to one of the work's secrets, however: towards the end of the piece, there's an etiolated melody that appears in the percussion; Birtwistle told me during rehearsals that this is the tune What the World Needs Now is Love. You heard it here first: Birtwistle quotes Burt Bacharach!
Oustripping even Secret Theatre for searing emotional power was Claron McFadden's performance of Birtwistle's Nine Settings of Celan, songs usually heard as part of the gigantic Pulse Shadows cycle, in which the vocal numbers are interpolated by music for string quartet. Heard instead as a continuous sequence of songs, there was an unflinching sense of bearing witness to the intensity of Celan's poems in the sharp-edged lyricism of Birtwistle's music and the breathtaking clarity of McFadden's voice, at some moments reduced to a whisper, at others, entwining ethereally with the instrumentalists. At one point she even made her vocal line fuse with the sound of the two clarinets, creating an uncanny meta-instrument of voice and woodwinds.
Strange and wonderful place, Salzburg. The festival's main venues are carved sideways into the cliff that looms behind the inner city, so the audience from the opera house (the night I was there, a dramatically and musically inert production of Verdi's Falstaff, directed by Damiano Michieletto with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta) tip out theatrically on to the main drag with its red carpets and restaurants. And the papers there are full of the festival, as you'd imagine. And as you wouldn't - it's not just the reviews, it's the gossip pages too. The supposed frostiness in the starry partnership of Anna Netrebko and Erwin Schrott (the evidence for which seemed to be that they weren't holding hands on the red carpet this year, whereas last year they were, and testimony of unnamed "friends" that every relationship goes through its difficult times, etc, etc...) fills the space that that British tabloids reserve for Posh, Becks and the rest of the litany of pseudo-celeb-dom. It's a sign of how much the musical scene matters to Salzburg - although it's probably not great if you're Anna or Erwin.
Another of the other big stories at Salzburg this year is the largest single importation of Venezula's El Sistema ensembles at a festival of all time ever: over 1,000 young musicians in six ensembles. José Antonio Abreu has been called the "Gandhi of classical music", and brooking any disagreement on that idea or criticising any other aspect of El Sistema is tantamount to heresy. I personally don't agree, either with the Gandhi comparison or the notion that El Sistema is a universal musical good, but there were signs in Austria that just as important as the South American example were the ways that new initiatives in Europe are responding to the challenges of creating meaningful musical opportunities for otherwise disenfranchised children. Superar is an organisation working with children in Austria and Switzerland, but also in Romania, Bosnia, and Turkey. Some children from Bosnia and Romania were making their first trip away from home to sing with the El Sistema ensemble in Salzburg. These are lives lived only a few hundred miles from the richest parts of Europe - yet in another world. Looking to South America for inspirational music-making ideas is one thing, but there are opportunities in parts of Europe that organisations such as Superar and many others must continue to create. Reported by guardian.co.uk 14 hours ago.
Quick word from Salzburg, and a couple of days at the Festival earlier this week taking part in the Preis der Schallplattenkritik's Quartett der Kritiker.
Harrison Birtwistle is one of this year's featured composers (you can read Fiona Maddocks' review of the flagship event of the Birtwistle-residency, a new production of his opera Gawain, in tomorrow's Observer), and his music was the focus of two fabulously engrossing concerts in the Kollegienkirche from Austrian new music ensembles Klangforum Wien and OENM.
Klangforum's performance of the 1984 masterpiece Secret Theatre was a Birtwistlean thrill ride of explosivity and stasis; Sylvain Cambreling conducted with uncompromising precision, energy, and hell-for-leather speeds that pushed his players to their expressive and technical limits. After OENM's performance of the shattering, raw elementality of Verses for Ensemble the night before (a piece that Birtwistle described to me as his vision of a "music before music" and which still sounds primordially rich and strange, 44 years after it was written), Secret Theatre sounded more sophisticated in its essentially joyful play of instrumental theatre, and its complex counterpoint between "cantus and continuum", as Birtwistle describes the two most obvious layers of the music. And yet it never lost - just as Birtwistle's music has never lost - its sense of simultaneous ancientness and coruscating modernity.
One clue to one of the work's secrets, however: towards the end of the piece, there's an etiolated melody that appears in the percussion; Birtwistle told me during rehearsals that this is the tune What the World Needs Now is Love. You heard it here first: Birtwistle quotes Burt Bacharach!
Oustripping even Secret Theatre for searing emotional power was Claron McFadden's performance of Birtwistle's Nine Settings of Celan, songs usually heard as part of the gigantic Pulse Shadows cycle, in which the vocal numbers are interpolated by music for string quartet. Heard instead as a continuous sequence of songs, there was an unflinching sense of bearing witness to the intensity of Celan's poems in the sharp-edged lyricism of Birtwistle's music and the breathtaking clarity of McFadden's voice, at some moments reduced to a whisper, at others, entwining ethereally with the instrumentalists. At one point she even made her vocal line fuse with the sound of the two clarinets, creating an uncanny meta-instrument of voice and woodwinds.
Strange and wonderful place, Salzburg. The festival's main venues are carved sideways into the cliff that looms behind the inner city, so the audience from the opera house (the night I was there, a dramatically and musically inert production of Verdi's Falstaff, directed by Damiano Michieletto with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta) tip out theatrically on to the main drag with its red carpets and restaurants. And the papers there are full of the festival, as you'd imagine. And as you wouldn't - it's not just the reviews, it's the gossip pages too. The supposed frostiness in the starry partnership of Anna Netrebko and Erwin Schrott (the evidence for which seemed to be that they weren't holding hands on the red carpet this year, whereas last year they were, and testimony of unnamed "friends" that every relationship goes through its difficult times, etc, etc...) fills the space that that British tabloids reserve for Posh, Becks and the rest of the litany of pseudo-celeb-dom. It's a sign of how much the musical scene matters to Salzburg - although it's probably not great if you're Anna or Erwin.
Another of the other big stories at Salzburg this year is the largest single importation of Venezula's El Sistema ensembles at a festival of all time ever: over 1,000 young musicians in six ensembles. José Antonio Abreu has been called the "Gandhi of classical music", and brooking any disagreement on that idea or criticising any other aspect of El Sistema is tantamount to heresy. I personally don't agree, either with the Gandhi comparison or the notion that El Sistema is a universal musical good, but there were signs in Austria that just as important as the South American example were the ways that new initiatives in Europe are responding to the challenges of creating meaningful musical opportunities for otherwise disenfranchised children. Superar is an organisation working with children in Austria and Switzerland, but also in Romania, Bosnia, and Turkey. Some children from Bosnia and Romania were making their first trip away from home to sing with the El Sistema ensemble in Salzburg. These are lives lived only a few hundred miles from the richest parts of Europe - yet in another world. Looking to South America for inspirational music-making ideas is one thing, but there are opportunities in parts of Europe that organisations such as Superar and many others must continue to create. Reported by guardian.co.uk 14 hours ago.