Nobody has described the essence and importance of virtuosity better than the brilliant cellist Emanuel Feuermann: “To be a virtuoso means: to have the greatest playing ability, to respect the work of art and to have the ability to bring one’s own personality meaningfully into the work of art.” It follows: “Virtuoso should be an honorary title, and I believe that even among the greatest on today’s podium, few deserve it.” What Feuermann formulated at the end of the 1930s undoubtedly applies to this day. Anyone who has ever experienced the Swiss Maurice Steger with the otherwise reviled recorders knows immediately that virtuosity in Feuermann’s sense can not be a pious wish, but rather an intoxicating, electrifying reality that arouses almost incredulous amazement.
In the musical May offensive of the “Stars & Rising Stars” series, Steger played concerts by Georg Philipp Telemann and Antonio Vivaldi with the Salzburger Hofmusik under Wolfgang Brunner so stunningly witty and technically so phenomenal that the audience in the drafty, cool inner courtyard of the Ministry of the Interior immediately got really hot with excitement. The legendary Odeon was here until 1944, once considered the best concert hall in Europe by Bruno Walter. The magnificent apse with the now empty niches for composer busts is unmistakably reminiscent of the Odeon. Feuermann also performed here. How nice and wistful that music is played here in front of a real audience from time to time.
Certainly, the current room on the ground floor with a stone floor is reverberant, the hall used to be on the first floor. But anyone who knows how to phrase and articulate as lightly and virtuosically as Steger and the brilliant 24-year-old violinist Ziyu He can, is immediately enchanted. At the beginning, Ziyu He and the 15-year-old Elias Keller offered Antonin Dvořák’s sonatina in a slim, rhythmically to the point and in the melodic parts so cantabile and soulful, but never sentimental that it was pure pleasure. Elias Keller managed Frédéric Chopin’s Ballad in F major rather fragmentarily, the grand piano sound has a difficult time acoustically. The Salzburg court music, cheerfully moderated by Wolfgang Brunner, shone with Telemann’s witty Don Quixote suite, happily improvised into Arcangelo Corelli’s La Folia Variations and finally turned Vivaldi’s “Summer” into a rousing bouncer with the grandiose Ziyu He. Big cheers!