When the traveler leaves the Salzburg train station, he sees a strangely unadorned concrete structure at the other end of the forecourt, an oversized table that is completely missing one leg. Another leg, which the traveler only sees when approaching, ends in a bandaged metal head that seems to support the entire table top. This controversial and even mocked monument is simple and unsettling, Heimo Zobernig created it in 2002. An admission of guilt by the city is engraved on the underside of the plate, and finally there is a call to oppose fascism. During the German occupation, people were deported from the Salzburg train station to the extermination camps.
The one preceding the Salzburg Festival Overture spiritual also starts with the culture of remembrance, for which there are even more examples in the cityscape. This is noticeable, especially since German cities hardly admit guilt so aggressively. But even in Salzburg there are still a number of street names that are reminiscent of Nazis. Next Sunday, the local concentration camp association / association of anti-fascists wants to rename Herbert-von Karajan-Platz, the man not only joined the NSDAP once, in a symbolic art action, the new name will only be announced at the ceremony.
In contrast to the main program, the concert week is also attended by locals
The pianist and manager Markus Hinterhäuser is now heading the festival for the fifth year. Hinterhäuser has always had a weakness for meaningful, resistant, modern, unfamiliar and spiritual things. In contrast to the main program, the concert week is also attended by many locals interested in music, as it fits in perfectly with this stronghold of the Counter-Reformation, which is interspersed with churches. It is one of the ingenious inventions of Hinterhäuser’s predecessor Alexander Pereira, who broke the boundaries of art and finance, but it is only now developing its full radiance. Even if Hinterhäuser’s favorite composers, above all Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen, are not on the program.
This year’s overture is dedicated to commemorating the dead. As in the four grandiose concerts described here, which with many unknown masterpieces over two days in the Kollegienkirche and Mozarteum hall not only wander through the times from the Middle Ages to the modern, but also the most distant zones of Europe. With the funeral office of Cristóbal de Morales, conducted with great fervor by Jordi Savall, Spanish Renaissance mourning met Byzantine Orthodox contemplations of eternity, which conductor Teodor Currentzis had two choir formations from his “musicAeterna” troupe perform in a two-hour, non-stop concert with candlelight until after midnight .
In addition to the medieval all-rounder Hildegard von Bingen, the Neapolitan baroque master Antonio Lotti and the modern grandmaster György Ligeti were also represented. But most composers are unlikely to know anything in the West. Regardless of whether the pieces are by Andreas Moustoukis, Balasios Iereus or Iakobos Peloponnesios Protopsaltes, there is always a calm and completely undramatic spirituality that has nothing in common with the baroque expressiveness typical of Salzburg. Accordingly, the audience reacted cautiously and helplessly well after midnight.
For all other pieces the applause was more enthusiastic. A few years ago the pianist Igor Levit had a huge success with Frederic Rzewski’s one-hour “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”. Now, with the still less well-known “Passacaglia on DSCH”, he is adding an even longer piece of 90 minutes, an immense piano fireworks that inspire the audience, virtuoso, political, tender, visionary, explosive, fundamentally tonal and never fancifully puzzling. The composer is Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015), who composed the four-tone motif D-Es-CH, repeated three hundred times according to the program booklet, in his admiration for Dmitri Shostakovich, who was often harassed by the Soviets. At the same time he competes with great piano composers like Liszt, Alkan, Busoni and brings in a lot of Baroque and Bach, up to a 20-minute triple fugue, which recently incorporated the Gregorian “Dies irae”, already cannibalized by Hector Berlioz, with the Stevenson of the six million commemorates Jews murdered by the Nazis. A darkly slow “Adagissimo barocco” becomes louder and more hammered and fanatical. It closes this marvel, which Igor Levit, the Salzburg Festival and an enthusiastic cheering audience attract the greatest attention.
Messiaen was a Catholic and synesthesiologist, ornithologist and fan of India, and a lover of colors and sound orgies
Olivier Messiaen and John Adams deal with grief quite differently, much more modern and above all beyond the old major-minor harmony. Messiaen is represented twice. The “Et expecto resurrectionem mourtuorum”, conceived for wind instruments and percussion, laments the victims of the World War, it unfolds a severe inner force with conductor Pablo Heras-Casado. The splicingly sharp sounds that cut into the ear, the apocalyptic drum eruptions are less softened by the reverberant acoustics of the Kollegienkirche, than condensed into a global complaint and accusation. Heras-Casado combines sobriety with ecstasy. This is a more modern approach than the troupe led by clarinetist and composer Jörg Widmann in Messiaen’s “Quatuor pour la fin du temps”, it is one of his most successful pieces.
Messiaen was a Catholic and synesthesiologist, ornithologist and fan of India, and a lover of colors and sound orgies. As a prisoner of war in Silesia in 1941 he composed the “Quatuor”, an eight-sentence celebration of life, a jubilee of Jesus and a liturgy of sound. Violinist Alina Ibragimova, cellist Nicolas Altstaedt and least of all pianist Francesco Piemontesi, like Widmann, relied on the very big expressive expression, from which every distance is far. It’s overwhelming like the old masters, but it also brings a dash of kitsch into play, from which Messiaen is never entirely immune. And it is diametrically opposed to the approach of the string quartet Meta4, which John Adam’s Shoah study “Different Trains” approach in a cooler, more considered and more distant manner. This approach, which seems much more contemporary, goes wonderfully together with Adam’s tireless sound repetitions, his machine aesthetics and the tapes. The piece is reminiscent of its theme (the extermination trains going to the death camps) and its emotionally chilled mourning work of Heimo Zobernig’s Antifa memorial in front of the train station. Perhaps the greatest horror can only be mastered artistically beyond the usual emotionality.