Vladimir Jurowski has been chief conductor of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB) since 2017 and general music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich since 2021. In this respect, it has a piquant note when he now stops in neighboring Augsburg with his Berlin orchestra. The RSB is currently on an anniversary tour to mark its hundredth birthday, but has brought a gift to the Augsburg Mozart Festival for its opening weekend: the overture to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” will be heard at the beginning, before Ivan Karizna will play Dmitri Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2 under Jurowski’s baton.
The young cellist is a breathtaking, also special musician who, even visibly, allows himself to be drawn into Shostakovich’s dark worlds. The tone for this is enormously capable of modulation, can sing and saw, dance and attack, shimmers in the piano and glows in the forte. With Shostakovich you can feel the paranoia, the deserts of loneliness, in the encore a spiritual power: Karizna also sings to Giovanni Sollima’s “Lamentatio”.
Of course, Jurowski can also do Shostakovich, but you can find out more about the conductor in the second part of Franz Schubert’s Great Symphony in C major. Like Mozart, Jurowski approaches it from the spirit of historical performance practice. The RSB plays with a sharp separating sound; the winds often dominate the low-vibrato strings, especially since the heavy brass is positioned on the far right side. Jurowski cuts the phrases as if with a razor, grading their dynamics against each other in small parts. The tempos are rather fast, the energy consistently high. Crescendi are used as a stylistic device, not in a blanket manner, but follow wave after wave until the sheer volume almost blows up the concert hall in the Kongress am Park. This is – without any judgment – a different sound ideal than the one offered by the Bavarian State Orchestra. And it also explains why Jurowski in Munich has so far focused more on the 20th century and on Mozart.
However, it doesn’t have much to do with the Augsburg Mozart Festival. His busy boss Simon Pickel has just bought everything that fills the halls, not just the visually and acoustically more attractive Small Golden Hall. Nevertheless, a lot of Mozart will be heard there over the next two weekends, with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, tenor Mauro Peter or Kristian Bezuidenhout on the fortepiano, as well as mixed programs with countertenor Bejun Mehta and soprano Véronique Gens. “Catchy Tunes” is the motto this year, asking about the formative power of Mozart’s melodies. And Jurowski’s performance in Augsburg is definitely catchy.