Schumann, Piano Concerto in A minor; Smetana, Má vlast. Víkingur Ólafsson, piano;  Berliner Philharmoniker, Kirill Petrenko, conductor

 I have never heard Víkingur Ólafsson play anything other than Bach and Mozart live, so I was looking forward to hearing what he did with the Schumann concerto. And I have never heard the whole of Ma Vlast before, let alone been to a live performance – in fact I only know the first two movements – Vysehrad and Vltava – well, and have, to my certain knowledge, only ever heard Vltava live. I may once have heard ‘From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields’ on Radio 3. ‘Sarka’, ‘Tabor’ and ‘Blanik’ are completely new to me. All this – plus the Berlin Phil and Petrenko – looked to be a very considerable treat as a concert.

Vltava I heard first when I was about 11 when my friend Ian in Hackney shared with me a vinyl EP he had of the work. I remember loving the fast dance bit in the middle of the work. The Schumann piano concerto by the early 80’s seemed to crop up at almost every London concert I went to. I had got very tired of it, and indeed, 40 years or more on, I can’t remember when thereafter I ever went to a live performance.

This was a glorious performance, for a number of reasons:

1, Vikingur Olafsson has the power to make you feel every note he plays is being freshly thought about. There were wonderful examples of this – the opening statement of the main theme on the piano, the dialogue of the piano with woodwind in the development section of the first movement, and the way the piano responded and played with the lower strings in the second theme of the slow movement. His playing also has a special intensity – you have to listen

2. This pianist has a lovely limpidity of tone – very elegant and thoughtful, not emoting and banging away – and the ability to make fine distinctions of volume in phrasing, as well as (of course) superb clarity technically. This was particularly evident in the finale

3. The superb playing of the Berlin Phil woodwind and horns – these were a constant delight, particularly oboe and clarinet in the development section of the first movement

4. The sense of sharp rhythmic impetus Petrenko and the orchestra gave to the music – skipping, biting string sounds particularly in the finale, and the end of the exposition of the first movement. Petrenko seemed a very supportive accompanist, often turning round to check speeds and timing with Olafsson

Olafsson seemed very keen on being at the Proms when he first appeared in 2021, and he spoke tonight of the extraordinary feeling of that concert, so soon after Covid, and the emphasis on community he feels the Proms has. As an encore he played Bach, one of life’s loners – a piece he recorded in his wonderful Bach transcription album, an adagio from an organ sonata BWV 528. The audience went wild

It is of course Smetana’s 200th anniversary this year. It seems in a sense a slightly odd piece of programming to have the Czech Philharmonic in London a few days earlier and not have them play Ma Vlast, and then have the Berlin Philharmonic a few days later with it on their programme – wouldn’t it have been better to give the Asrael Symphony to Petrenko and co (a much more general central-European sound, not specifically Czech)? Anyway………I guess maybe the point is to show Smetana’s universality…….

However, universality is not what it’s about – Ma Vlast is a foundational piece of Czech nationalism and national identity, and very specifically grounded in the landscape and history of Czechia. I found it difficult to relate to at first, as I listened to the whole of Ma Vlast for the first time, and wondered really what its narrative meant for me, a non-Czech listening 150 years after it was written. What I came to feel over the 75 minutes of the performance is that it was better to listen to it just as a piece of pure music, without any tone poem associations, and just enjoy the sheer melodic sweetness and inspiration and rhythmic bounce of much of the music. I was particularly taken by some of the pieces I know less well – Sarkar and From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields, the former having an exciting story about a Boudicca figure in Czech history who declares war on men – with fast moving music that was brilliantly played – and the latter, having more of a pictorial focus, with again exciting and memorable music. Vltava was faster than usual but with a terrific account from the Berlin Phil strings of the eddying flows of the river, and burbling from the woodwind. Tabor is rather heavy-going and tedious, with a repeated 4 note theme depicting Hussites getting very cross which gets on one’s nerves after a time but Blanik revives the good humour and provides an effective ending. There are Wagnerian tinges at times, but a lot of the music is surprisingly unrelated to say Brahms and Schubert. I guess the occasionally heard voice that is present in Ma Vlast is Liszt, without most of his bombast and note-spinning

The playing of the Berlin Phil was quite extraordinary and utterly impeccable – wonderful horn playing from Stefan Dohr, beautiful oboe playing from Jonathan Kelly, but above all it was the brilliance and tightness of the ensemble that impressed – the tripping dance music, the intensity, the tremendous climaxes, and the absolute precision (all of these present for instance in the final few minutes of From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields, and the grandeur and excitement of the last 5 minutes of Blanik). Throughout, Petrenko emphasised the dance element in the music, doing a waltz with himself on stage. But Petrenko is very far from being a podium show-off – his absolute and total commitment to the music, his complete belief in it, was palpable, and his unconditional focus on what the orchestra is doing was evident all through the concert.

Vítězslava Kaprálová, Military Sinfonietta; Dvořák, Piano Concerto in G minor; Janáček Glagolitic Mass. Mao Fujita, piano; Corinne Winters, soprano; Bella Adamova, mezzo-soprano; David Butt Philip, tenor; Brindley Sherratt, bass – replaced b Pavel Švingr; Christian Schmitt, organ; The City of Prague Philharmonic Choir, Czech Philharmonic, Jakub Hrůša, conductor

I made a fairly late decision to go to this and managed to get a front row Chor seat just in front of the organ and behind the choir –  a rather spectacular seat for total immersion and a lot of noise in the Janacek piece, if less satisfactory for the Dvorak concerto.

As with the previous evening, the hall was packed out – there was a sense of real excitement in the air.

Vitezslava Kapralova (born Brno 1915- died Montpellier 1940) is a short-lived twentieth-century Czech composer, though completely unknown to me, and this Sinfonietta dates from 1936 – she apparently conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in it in 1938.  She is as you can see from the dates roughly a contemporary of Britten. Thinking about her, it is as though all we had of Britten’s musical output was limited to what he had composed up until the late 1930’s. It is clearly a tragedy that this composer died so young. The work is bright, clever – not unlike the Britten of the piano concerto, in fact – and held me totally throughout its ? 15 minute length. Who knows what she might have achieved had she lived even as long as Britten?

While I know the Glagolitic Mass very well, and have been to some very good performances of it by the Halle in recent years, the Dvorak Piano Concerto is not a work I know at all, really. I have the famous recording with Richter and Kleiber which I have played once or twice, but the piece has not lodged itself at all in my memory. I have to say that, encountering it in this performance, I was pleasantly surprised. Though it’s not a masterpiece, and goes on for too long and probably needs to be cut back by at least 10 minutes, this performance I found to be engaging for the most part, and indeed the main themes were much more memorable than I had recalled – the slow movement is really lovely. Mao Fujita gave the best possible account of it – even from my position in the Choir you could hear that his poetic and sensitive reading, never grand standing, and always focusing on making the phrasing of passages as beautiful as possible, was of high quality. The Czech Phil accompanied him beautifully too (incidentally this orchestra must have the last surviving tradition in its horn section of the old slightly whiney vibrato-heavy sound that all the Russian (and French) orchestras used to have 50 years ago).

The Glagolitic Mass was tremendous – as how could it not be when I was sitting 6 feet away from the organ and 3 feet away from the back of the heads of the male section of the choir plus maybe 12 feet from the timps. The City of Prague Philharmonic Choir made a tremendous noise, given that there were only maybe 80 of them and of course sounded utterly authentic. Hrusa got a real swing going in the orchestral passages, and the Czech Phil brass were particularly impressive – together with a very assertive timpani player (important in this work). I think this setting of the Mass is one of the best I know, and was particularly uplifting in this performance.  While Janacek himself was an agnostic, as a believer I find this work very sensitive to the Christian message, giving a radiant sense of the sacredness of creation to the words of the Mass. Hrusa didn’t go hell for leather with the rhythmic elements – there was a wonderful feeling of spaciousness, of the open evening sky, about the end of the Credo, for instance. One thing I noticed again and again, not only in the Janacek but also in the Dvorak the evening before, is that conductor and orchestra weren’t creating excitement by whipping up speed or accentuating the rhythms but giving the music the space to allow the orchestration and marked dynamics to do their work. It was impressive also to hear the Albert Hall organ put through its paces in the penultimate movement. The singers sounded, of course, with their backs to me , somewhat indistinct but as far as I could tell David Butt Phillip was dealing well with the challenging tenor role. Though no announcement was made, Brindley Sherratt definitely wasn’t singing the bass part as originally advertised…..The final minute or so was just tremendously exciting…….!

Bach, Mompou and Liszt.

I went to a lunchtime concert today before the evening concert. The brief programme note indicated that Cristo Harijan is a “22 year old pianist who has just concluded his final year as an undergraduate studying with Murray Mclachlan at the Royal Northern College of Music, Cristo graduated with a first, receiving the outstanding mark of 94/100 for his final undergraduate recital’.  The precise pieces played were

Bach / Busoni: Chaconne from the Partita 2 in D minor BWV 1004

Mompou, F:

Nocturne – Lentement modéré

Musica Callada:

3 – Placide

6 – Lento

13 – Tranquilo

16 – Calme

20 – Calme

27 – Lento molto

Liszt, F:

Transcendental Etudes S139:

4 – ‘Mazeppa’

11 – ‘Harmonies du soir’

12 – ‘Chasse neige’

The piece I liked most, because I know it best, was the Busoni arrangement of the Bach Chaconne. Mompou is a composer I had never heard of until very recently, when I saw that Stephen Hough was programming him. He was Spanish – early to mid twentieth century – and his music sounds a bit like Debussy, or Satie. It’s melancholy, atmospheric and easy on the ear, though maybe 7 pieces is a bit too much of a good thing for music that in a sense sounds much the same in each piece. I’m afraid I never have much time for Liszt, and the three pieces conformed to type – noisy, pedestrian thematically and immediately forgotten after hearing, with notes tumbling out this way and that. Mr Harijan sounded pretty impressive in his playing – though whether he was using too much pedal in the Bach or whether, like most churches, the acoustic properties of the space were just very resonant, I am not sure.

Dvořák, Cello Concerto in B minor; Josef Suk, Symphony
No. 2, ‘Asrael’. Anastasia Kobekina, cello; Czech Philharmonic, Jakub Hrůša,
conductor

Doomsters this year were saying that the Proms would last 6
weeks only and that the big foreign orchestras were no longer going to be
affordable for the Proms. But, lo and behold, we have three of the top ten
orchestras in the world visiting the Proms in the last three weeks, including
the Czech Philharmonic, plus several major and very good second ranking
visitors (Rotterdam, Orchestre de Paris) and numerous first rate specialist
overseas bands (e.g. the Bach Collegium Japan, Il Pomo d’Oro) appearing during
the season. There’s everything to indicate though that the resources which
provide all this could be whisked away very quickly. We have to fight against
that happening while just being very, very grateful the Proms continue to
operate at the level they do.

Suk’s Asrael Symphony has only ever been performed once at
the Proms before, by  Libor Pešek and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in 1991. I have never owned a recording of it until just recently, in preparation for this performance, and have never heard it live, so I was really keen to go to this concert. But first we had the
Dvorak Cello Concerto as a (very welcome) warm-up……I really enjoyed this
performance, above all because of the wonderful Czech Phil woodwind, and the
way they made me listen afresh to the orchestral accompaniment to the soloist –
there were times when it felt like I was hearing the piece as though restored
to its original colours, and was hearing music I had never heard before. Very
fine too was the way the orchestra always gave a lilt to the rhythms of the
piece. And the yearning moments came across more intensely than I can recall
from other performances (though I have to say I have heard many, including the
legendary one in the 1968 Proms with Rostropovitch, Svetlanov and the USSR
State Symphony Orchestra, amid protests in London and calls for the concert to
be cancelled because of Russian tanks rolling into Prague that day). The
soloist for this concert, Anastasia Kobekina, produced some beautiful phrasing
but also could play the energetic passages with point and impact. The way the
slow passage towards the end of the finale was played, quietly, passionately
and building up to an immense climax, by soloist and orchestra, was
outstanding. Ms Kobekina played something by her father with a member of the
Czech Phil percussion section as an encore, a folky piece.

Suk’s work was completed in 1906 following the deaths first
of his father-in-law (Dvorak), in 1904, and then of his wife. Asrael is the
angel of death – in Islam the carrier of souls after death. The work is scored
for a standard late Romantic orchestra- 4 horns but only double-woodwind, and 3
trumpets and trombones). It has 5 movements. There are a lot of influences
clearly present in the work – the Wagner of Tristan and Parsifal, Mahler at
times, Bruckner – but Suk does come across as having a voice of his own. There
is a clear and fundamental death, or Asrael, motif that begins the work, and
the way that motif gets transformed throughout the work, and it final
appearance as the lovely chorale in the final 5 minutes, is something any
listener new to the piece can enjoy. There are several themes from the work
still reverberating in my head as I write this, always a good sign…..I did
enjoy listening to the work but I also think it does at times seem episodic.
The programme booklet tries to put a positive spin on it – the work
‘encompasses both angry denial, and the consolations of memory”. The first
movement is ‘sombre’, the second full of ‘despairing sighs’, the third is full
of ‘fevered imaginings;, the fourth represents ‘wistful recollections’ and the
fifth is ‘defiant’. Well, yes, and there are at times moments that are exciting
or beautiful, but also points at which things stop and start and seem to peter
out or start off in a different direction. Maybe I need to listen to the work a
few more times. I suspect if I had got to know this work as a teenager, and
played it again and again in the way I got to know pieces as a teenager, I
would love this piece. Certainly the orchestra played it sonorously and
wonderfully – as good as one is ever likely to hear .

Given that Hrusa becomes Music Director of ROHCG next year, I was interested to see his conducting style close up. He gives large gestures – big swings of his stick – and has a very clear and energetic beat – it was also iunteresting to see, given his role in operas, how attentive he was to the soloist.

 Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto in D major op. 35; Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 in D minor op. 47. Lisa Batiashvili Violin; Oslo Philharmonic; Klaus Mäkelä Conductor

…..So, the last concert of my 10 day trip to Bayreuth and Salzburg……….And here was Klaus with his ‘old’ orchestra, from the time when he only had one to deal with as chief conductor, as opposed to his future, where he is to be leading the Concertgebouw and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, ?as well as L’Orchestre de Paris. I heard him with this Oslo band two years ago at the Proms, when they were playing ‘Ein Heldenleben’ – that was an excellent performance. I wonder if this one in Salzburg was also originally meant to have Yuja Wang as the soloist – anyway they found someone almost equally starry in Lisa Batiashvili.  I raised more than a quizzical eyebrow, in fact winced, at the price of this concert ticket for  – what? 85 minutes plus a couple of encores, so I was expecting something special. I know Makela is being marketed as something special but I have seen him twice over the last two years…………………..

I remember that I must have acquired a recording of the Tchaikovsky concerto from when I was 11, but I have a particular memory of going to bed about 8pm one evening not long after that, and then being woken up by my parents about 9pm and asked if I wanted to listen to this concerto on TV – I think this was the performance by somebody called Mikhail Waiman with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky at the Proms. This would have been in August 1966, just before I turned 14. I think I might have seen live the same conductor and soloist perform the concerto in 1971 with what was then the Leningrad Philharmonic. Beyond that I can’t remember having been to many live performances of the work – though I must have been to some……..

Bizarrely, though the orchestra pit was covered over and thus the stage extended towards the audience, for this performance the management had left the flying saucers over the orchestra from the previous night’s performance – they glowed red throughout the show. I was on the extreme left of the Felsenreitschule stage in Row 1 so sometimes sounds from the other end of the orchestra sounded softer than they might to someone sitting in the middle. I enjoyed the Tchaikovsky performance very much – it had dancing rhythms, and a real lilt to the melodies. When the climaxes came they were exciting and pointed, but often the orchestra was kept down to allow the soloist to shine through – she came across very clearly even from where I was sitting.. The soloist sounded technically superb and produced some totally secure melting high notes. Makela (a cellist) and Lisa Batiashvili did a little pizzicato duo as an encore.

I have heard many fine Shostakovich 5’s over the years, and this was another very, very good one. The two that have most lodged in my memory were both performances by Russian orchestras – Yuri Tenirkanov and the Leningrad Phil at the Proms in 1971, and another Russian orchestra (I think it might have been the Moscow Philharmonic) in 2001 in Sheffield, which almost blew the roof off the City Hall, so raucous and excitable was it. This Oslo performance was extremely well played – woodwind particularly – and climaxes were again very finely judged. The slow movement had rare intensity and the strings were thrilling when they throb with loud emotion towards the end of that movement. The end of the finale was done the Russian way – building up to an enormous climax very slowly like a fleet of Soviet tanks rumbling along. This is the first time the Oslo orchestra has been in Salzburg since 2000, when they came with their ex-boss Mariss Jansons, and they got a standing ovation from the Salzburg audience, which was thoroughly deserved

Timur Zangiev Conductor; Peter Sellars, Director; George Tsypin, Sets; Camille Assaf, Costumes; James F. Ingalls Lighting. Peixin Chen, The General; Asmik Grigorian, Polina; Sean Panikkar, Alexey Ivanovich; Violeta Urmana, the ‘Babulenka’ ; Juan Francisco Gatell, The Marquis ; Michael Arivony, Mr Astley; Nicole Chirka, Blanche; Zhengyi Bai, Prince Nilsky; Ilia Kazakov, Baron Wurmerhelm. Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus, Vienna Philharmonic
I spent a pleasant few hours walking around the Residenz, and its Gallery and Museums, seeing the Modern Art Museum (a very good photography exhibition), and having a splendid beef goulash and bread dumpling lunch. Then, on to The Gambler.
This was conceived far earlier in Prokofiev’s career than I had assumed – in its original form it was written and indeed planned to be put on stage before the Revolution, with Vsevolod Meyerhold, no less, engaged as the director. However with the Revolution there was much uncertainty about putting it on stage and so the first performance – with some revisions by Prokofiev – wasn’t until 1929 in Brussels
It’s based on (another) Dostoyesvsky novel and is set in Roulettenburg, a fictional European spa resort in the 1860s. The young tutor Alexei has fallen in love with Polina, who is a ward of the General. The latter owes money to the Marquis, who is also as a rival to Alexei in being involved with Polina. The General hopes that his aunt, (and Polina’s grandmother) the Babulenka, will die, leaving him her money which will make him an attractive partner to the much younger Blanche; instead, the Babulenka turns up, very much alive, and loses everything in a wild gambling binge. After that everyone and everything starts to unravel……..So 6 main characters are involved……..
The Sellars production is again very effective in dealing with the peculiarities of the Felsenreitschule stage, which as I’ve said previously is very, very wide and has little depth. The stage has about 6 stylised roulette wheels which can move up and down, and have various flashing coloured lights emanating from them – a bit like space ships…..The walls of the stage have large fractured pieces of glass which can flash images back or distort them. Somone has also sploshed a lot of green paint asymmetrically across roughly centre stage. The work was played without an interval, lasting about 2hrs and 5 minutes
As an opera, I wondered about it at first – maybe for the first 45 minutes or so. None of the characters come across as very sympathetic, and apart from Alexei are lightly sketched – the Marquis and the General are meant to be unlikeable and Polina isn’t given enough time at first for her character to be developed. Alexei is the fullest developed character but, again, he repels as much as anything else, making a lot of noise and sometimes arguing senselessly. I wondered why I should be bothered about what happens to them. Dramatically the work, I thought, begins to improve once the (assumed to be dying) Babulenka comes in – this scene and her mad behaviour at the roulette table is funny. The scene when Alexei as it were takes to the wheel to get the 50000 roubles to enable Polina to ‘throw in his face’ the offer of that sum the Marquis has made to her, as an attempt, as she sees it, to buy her, is dramatically compelling. And I did feel finally sorry by the end for Polina and the way everyone objectifies her and sees her in monetary terms.
Musically, it’s not easy going – much less tuneful than say the Love of Three Oranges, still less War and Peace. Nevertheless I was beginning to recognise some of the character motifs by the end, never ever having heard a note of the work before. There’s actually less abrasiveness and thumping ostinato rhythms than I had assumed, though they are certainly there – particularly of course in the roulette-playing scenes.
The cast was first class. Although she is a star name, Asmik Grigorian does not have that much to do in this piece, but when she was allowed to give full vent to her feelings, she did so very powerfully. She’s also a consummate actor, and very good at suggesting a grumpy slouchy teenager – and can still look the part. The show rests, though, on the energy of the person playing Alexei, and Sean Pannikar was excellent, dashing around the stage emoting and with a full bright tenor (he was of course Loge in ROHCG’s Rheingold last year). Violeta Urmana the veteran (well, over 60) Lithuanian soprano was magnificent as the Babulenka, and brought her still-present Wagnerian power (she’s sung Kundry, Brunnhilde and Isolde) to the role, shutting everyone else up. The General and the Marquis were sung and played well. The conductor was Timur Zangiev, who has been making a name for himself as a young up and coming Russian conductor – he’s recently conducted The Tale of Tsar Saltan at La Monnaie, Pique Dame and the Romeo and Juliet ballet at La Scala, Eugene Onegin at Munich etc etc. There’s been some grumbling in the Slipped Disc blog that he’s not had the Putin test applied to him, which to me seems to be almost on the same level as banning Tchaikovsky from Western halls. It’s one thing for fully-paid-up members of the Putin fan club to be blocked, but surely we shouldn’t be asking every Russian artist to make a statement that could have them imprisoned, exiled or their families threatened……? Was Furtwaengler banned before WW2 in the UK? – answer, no
Here is the trailer – (The Player • Salzburg Festival 2024 (salzburgerfestspiele.at) to enable a further look at the sets. I think ultimately I am very pleased I have seen this work live, and particular in this Sellars production, but I am not sure I would be making a beeline for another production of the work any time soon. Peter Sellars came on stage at the end, a diminutive now rather paunchy figure with the trademark upstanding hair you can just make him out on the first photo below in blue near to the conductor and Asmik Grigorian

Schoenberg, String Quartet No 1 in D minor op. 7; Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor op. 131. Belcea Quartet

 It’s been raining for most of the day and I still have two whole days after this one for touristy stuff before evening performances. So I wandered around and went only to the Cathedral – massive and ornate white and gold Rococo as you might expect – and Mozart’s birthplace, which is obviously a tourist trap of a major kind but doing its best to be serious for those interested. I was particularly struck by the large oil portrait of Constanze, dating to 1802, showing a very determined lady who managed Mozart’s posthumous reputation and documents very well – see photo below. And I had forgotten that her husband, von Nissen, eventually wrote the first biography of Mozart with all sorts of help from his wife. A pity that it doesn’t appear to be available in English currently.

And so on to Schoenberg and Beethoven – a very serious programme……….And I hadn’t realised that Schoenberg had actually written 4 quartets – I know the one with the voice, but this is the first time I have ever heard Op 7.

I should mention first something about Salzburg dress codes, or lack of them, incidentally. I was told beforehand that the Festival was much more formal than Bayreuth. In fact at the Weinberg opera there were a few DJ’s but a lot of the men were wearing dark suits. I was wearing suit trousers and an open necked white shirt and so were a few other other men, so there was some variety, thank goodness, and I didn’t feel conspicuous. But at this concert – inevitable perhaps given its content – anything was OK: there was a guy in tennis shirt and shorts, lots of short sleeve shirts, Hawaii shirts, a guy with a baseball hat and some in jeans. Good!!……………..Unfortunately the other inevitability of this concert was the curse of Schoenberg on the box office – the downstairs part of the Grosse Saal was full but the upstairs ‘Rang’ was empty. Nevertheless those who were there were very vocal in their appreciation.

The Schoenberg piece is one of his pre-atonal works, and in fact it has a very identifiable main theme at the beginning that is subject to umpteen transitions, variations and changes in the course of 40 minutes or so (I originally wrote slow – Freudian slip). I had read that it had 4 movements but got lost fairly on. It is an extraordinary piece – there are elements that sound like Mahler, others sounding like Brahms, there’s certainly some Viennese pop dance music, but all mixed up in a whirl of intersecting instruments that make it sound quite as dense as the Pelleas I heard 4 weeks ago at the Proms. I just couldn’t get the emotional narrative here, and yet I felt there probably was one – with a peaceful – or numb – ending.

The first movement of the Beethoven is almost as dense as the Schoenberg – it sounded startlingly modern in this reading – but what the Beethoven has is a clear – well, pick-upable – narrative trajectory: from sadness to humdrum daily routine, to (after a prelude) a core 4^th movement that copes with suffering, moves us to a joyful 5^th movement, and after a turn-around 6^th movement prelude, ends in toughness, some grief but also resilience and hope. I thought the Belcea Quartet played it very well indeed – more characterful than Ensemble 360 in Sheffield – but I did think, from a quibbly point of view, that they took the 5^th movement too fast, so that notes got elided.

So enthusiastic was the audience response that there was an encore – the wonderful 3^rd movement – ‘Solo’ – of Britten’s 3^rd Quartet, with what sounds like the flutterings of a soul released from earthly life

Brilliant concert………….

Oleg Ptashnikov, replacing Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla Conductor; Krzysztof Warlikowski Director; Małgorzata Szczęśniak Sets and Costumes; Felice Ross Lighting; Kamil Polak Video; Claude Bardouil Choreography. Bogdan Volkov, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin; Ausrine Stundyte, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova ; Vladislav Sulimsky,  Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin; Iurii Samoilov, Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev; Clive Bayley, Ivan Fyodorovich Yepanchin, general; Margarita Nekrasova.  Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Yepanchina, his wife; Xenia Puskarz, Aglaya Ivanovna Yepanchina; Jessica Niles, Alexandra Ivanovna Yepanchina; Pavol Breslik; Gavrila (Ganya) Ardalionovich Ivolgin. Herren der Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor; Vienna Philharmonic

This is only the 3rd production in this work’s history, apparently, at least in the West, though web sources mention performances at the Bolshoi and Marinsky Theatres as well.  There was also a reduced orchestra theatre performance in 1991 in Moscow while Weinberg was still alive but the first full premiere was not given until 2013 in Mannheim National Theatre under the musical direction of Thomas Sanderling. The Austrian premiere took place in April 2023 at the Theatre an der Wien in Vienna, and now we have this Salzburg production by Krzysztof Warlikowski and under the musical direction of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (though she was ill for this performance, and the conductor was her musical assistant in this production)

The story takes on only certain parts of the Dostoyevsky narrative and focuses on a quartet of four people – Prince Myshkin, who suffers from epilepsy, and is Christ-like; the dark-eyed beauty Nastasya, who Myshkin loves unreservedly. His love for her forces the upright Myshkin into a relationship with his rival for Nastasya, the rough Parfion Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son. At the same time Myshkin is held in deep affection by Aglaya, the youngest daughter of the Yepanchins, but to whom he is unable to engage in real commitment. In Pavlovsk, Nastasya gives her seemingly irrevocable commitment to the prince, but flees to Petersburg and marries Rogozhin. In the end Rogozhin stabs Nastasya and kills her. Myshkin finds Roghozhin lying aside the dead Nastasya and strokes Rogozhin’s head.

Let me say first I felt thrilled to be at what was essentially the first ever major international set of performances of this major work, with singers like Volkov and Stundyte, and with the Vienna Philharmonic in tow – a remarkable evening. And I do think it IS a major work. The music doesn’t have arias (nor in a sense does Mussorgsky) but does have motifs. It has a huge range of expression and musical devices – ostinato rhythms, thunderous climaxes, tolling bells, lyrical moments, and some folk song. It doesn’t have hummable tunes on first hearing but it is very accessible. The most important points for me were that 1. It is absolutely gripping and immersive (on the much shorter Part 2 see below); 2, although Weinberg composed massive amounts of music for films and even children’s cartoons, this is not a film score with voices – it is a properly thought-through opera with voices and orchestra working together as equals. For the life of me I cannot understand why this is less of an important work than anything by Tippett, or Henze or others in the 2^nd half of the 20^th century. Very little of it sounds derivative. It has to be said it is a long evening – maybe 3 hours and 20 minutes of music, and could maybe do with a bit of judicious cutting in the 2^nd half: I was left shattered by the first half, which was two hours, but the last hour has some domestic moments at the Yepanchins that dragged a bit, and maybe a bit less of Aglaya’s stress would also have helped. But this is for the future – on such an occasion this HAD to be performed complete. One wonders – and this might be part of the compulsiveness of the score – whether Weinberg unconsciously self-identified a bit with Myshkin; by all accounts he was an unworldly figure, who accepted even his temporary imprisonment in the late 1940’s with seemingly good grace, and remained eternally grateful to the Soviet Union and the Red Army for taking him in to the USSR when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 (he was the only member of his Jewish Polish family left alive after the war)

There is a good deal of flummery and rather high-falutin’ gnomic talk in Warlikowski’s account of his production in the programme booklet, but for me the important points were that it involved brilliant stage craft, clear story-telling, utterly convincing personen-regie and clever updating.  The production has to take account of the enormous width of the Felsenreitchule stage (I knew about the size of the Grosse Festspielhaus stage, built into the rock cliff, but this is just as enormous), and did this cleverly by having three acting areas across the stage, with some aspects of those areas being able to move from one area to another (like the train seats near the beginning). The setting is moved from Tsarist Russia to contemporary Putin era Moscow and St Petersburg, and this allows Rogozhin and his circle to be seen as oligarchs. But this is not overdone, and simply updates what is already there in the story. Despite its enormous size, the theatre is kind to voices so it was perfectly possible to hear the singers wherever they were positioned. The acting areas included a kind of bar area, extreme stage right, a bedroom / reception area associated with Nastasya, stage right. What was essentially the Yepanchins home, centre stage and slightly stage left, and a sort of waiting room/park area stage left. This is the trailer The Idiot • Salzburg Festival 2024 (salzburgerfestspiele.at)  which gives a further idea of the sets. It will be interesting to see how Peter Sellars deals with this space on Tuesday. A curious aspect of the area just slightly stage left is a whiteboard with various equations on it – I think this is meant to suggest Myshkin’s otherness, and an inability to be as others are – for good or ill, but I could be wrong. This is really the only bit of Warlikowski’s production that I’d call gnomic.

Bogdan Volkov as Myshkin was an immensely impressive high tenor with the power to fill this huge auditorium yet able to convey the sadness and isolation of this unworldly figure; Ausrine Stundyte was outstanding (and of course back in January she was a very impressive Elektra with ROHCG) and dramatically compelling as Nastasya, while Vladislav Sulimsky was an ideal dark-sounding Russian-style bass as Rogozhin.  Xenia Puskarz was very good as Aglaya, though maybe more differentiation between the sound of her and Stundyte’s voices might have been helpful – however that’s a casting issue, and nothing to do with the singing. Orchestra and chorus were wonderful

This was a great and inspiring evening. I have been exploring Weinberg’s symphonies and quartets for some time now, and to hear this opera is to offer exciting possibilities for further exploration. I really must go to ‘The Passenger’ somewhere soon – it can be quite frequently seen in Germany and Austria, according to Operabase

Mozart: Six German Dances K. 509; Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major K. 364; Divertimento for strings in F major K. 138; Symphony in D major, ’Paris’ K. 297. Clara-Jumi Kang, violin; Timothy Ridout, viola. Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, Andrew Manze Conductor

This was a nicely balanced programme with several work of Mozart’s earlier years (one a masterpiece – the Sinfonia Concertante) and the German Dances.

As far as I can work out, this orchestra is a subset of a larger Salzburg regional orchestra, and their strings have a traditional Austro-German sweetness and rich warmth of sound, Though I could be doing them disservice, nothing I could see or hear suggested in their Mozart guise this is a period instrument band, and I suspect they have probably been playing Mozart in much the same way for a very long time. The acoustic of the hall is quite a lively one – the sound is almost overwhelming when the trumpets, horns and timpani pile into the orchestral texture. I thought that Andrew Manze did very well to keep the textures of these works clear and not muddied, so you can hear the underlying shifts in harmony – helped by splitting the violins, and also to keep these works at speeds which makes them animated but  without the gabble that that sometimes mean. I thought he did a very good job with an orchestra that probably seems them come and go all the time.

The Sinfonia Concertante, which is by far the best of these pieces, was particularly effective. The two soloists were obviously listening closely to each other and responding to each other’s intuitions. The slow movement in particular was treasurable  

Schubert: Piano Sonata in G major D. 894; Die schöne Müllerin – Song cycle, D. 795. Julian Prégardien Tenor, András Schiff Pianoforte
…..and so, on to Salzburg, neither the Festival nor indeed the city of which I have ever visited before, after the sadly usual rail chaos (train arriving late in Munich so missed my scheduled train, got another one which sat at the station until it was announced to have a defect….anyway I’m here)
Andras Schiff, always one for spoken introductions, introduced his piano, which was an 1828 model from Vienna – ie made in the year of Schubert’s death and therefore having the sort of piano sound he would have been used to. That sound is much lighter and flexible, less clangy and allows for an extraordinary lightness of touch.
Before getting down to playing D894 Schiff played two openers, both I think from Schubert’s repertoire of dance music, one of which featured a Hungarian tune (as Schiff pointed out). The excellent biography of Schubert by Lorraine Bodley I am reading at present describes how important dance music was both to his pocket -that was where a lot of his income came from – and his friendship group/social circle and I reflected during this excellent performance how much of Schubert’s other work derives from dance rhythms and styles. His piano sonatas also include elements from the improvisatory aspect of Schubert’s musical life – as I listened to D894 you could hear that move towards improvisation in how the music moved forwards. There was in Schiff’s performance an extraordinary delicacy which he / the piano created in the middle part of the slow movement and the whole of the third. Using the piano for this work doesn’t bring you grandeur in the first movement but it does give extra shade and colour to other parts – it was a very different experience to listening to Paul Lewis on a concert grand just over 6 weeks ago; this performance was lighter, more lilting. I loved it…………………..
I know Die Schoene Mullerin fairly well as a work though I’ve not heard many live performances. Although I haven’t come across his name before Pregordien is clearly a major figure in the Austro-German musical world, inhabiting what one might call the ‘Peter Schreier repertory’ – Mozart tenors, Evangelists and lieder. That the performance was technically excellent goes without saying, and it was lovely to hear the work again. I have to say though that I found Pregordien’s approach a bit mannered, with exaggerated dynamics – at times only the front 3 rows could have heard exactly what he was singing. He also at times went into a falsetto voice I disliked. Interestingly, he was also adding a lot of grace notes to some of the songs which I didn’t recognise from my Fischer-Dieskau recording, whether this is historically informed performance practice or a new critical edition, I’m not sure. Curiously the haunting last song was almost jaunty in tempo. Still, these are minor quibbles
The Stiftung Mozarteum Grosse Saal is a nice auditorium but very cramped to get in and out of – I wouldn’t like to be caught in the hall with the fire alarm sounding (or an urgent need for the loo for that matter)