2023-06-12 08:15:00
The festival scored with a day tour to the Silbermannstadt on Saturday. But sometimes the devil is in the details.
The Dresden Music Festival has always been a multifaceted cultural institution. Only recently, festival director Jan Vogler emphasized that the intention was to open up to a wide variety of music genres and thus take into account the fact that the distinction between “serious” and “entertaining” has long since ended up on the garbage heap of cultural history in favor of that between good and bad music.
It doesn’t always have to be the Frauenkirche
And as far as that broad horizon goes, it’s not only true in terms of genres, but also geographically. If a place of worship is required as a concert venue, it does not always have to be the Frauenkirche. The festival program for Saturday afternoon invited to a musical experience outside the Dresden city limits – in the cathedral of Freiberg, which more than compensates for its external architectural inconspicuousness on the inside – in addition to the magnificent “mute” interior with two organs from the workshop of the cultural figurehead of the mountain town, Gottfried Silbermann.
Relevance of the Dresden area in the calculation
The festival organizers went so far as to turn the concert into a small day trip for those interested coming from Dresden – including an optional bus transfer, a visit to the Silbermannhaus, the Petrikirche and the cathedral as well as an exclusive organ demonstration in the latter church. By the way, a piece of tourism promotion for the region and a signal that the people of Dresden are well aware of the relevance of their surroundings, namely the Ore Mountains.
As a highlight, the day trippers and the concert visitors, most of whom had traveled independently, experienced two young and well-known experts in their field – the 31-year-old Hungarian trumpeter Tamás Pálfalvi in a duet with the 46-year-old from the Saarland-born organist Christian Schmitt.
Contrasts and consonances in the best acoustics
The two musicians sounded out the contrasts and consonances of their instruments in the interplay of works from the Baroque to the Romantic period up to the 20th century and showed impressively how ideal the acoustics of the church, consecrated in 1225, are suitable for this combination of instruments – whether the trumpet is now combined with the large Silbermann organ installed behind the congregation or with the small one to the left of and above the chancel. With her, Schmitt and Pálfalvi began their program, which, thanks to these two instruments, even offered opportunities for dramaturgical enhancement. From arrangements of Handel’s “Water Music” to the well-known Adagio by Bach’s contemporary Tomaso Albinoni, presented here in a very appealing, condensed form, to the popular “Serenade” from Franz Schubert’s “Schwanengesang”.
Pointing the way for those born later
Solo performances by Schmitt with the G major Fantasy by Johann Sebastian Bach and the Fourth Sonata by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy demonstrated Bach’s modernity on the one hand and Mendelssohn’s ability on the other to establish a romantic tonal language in organ music that had previously been used in this put an end to the existing stagnation in the instrumental branch and opened up new avenues for both other composers and organ building itself.
And yet the trees don’t grow to the sky. It was only after the concert program had been printed that the festival organizers realized that one of the two pieces from the “Window” cycle based on Marc Chagall by the Czech composer Petr Eben, who died in 2007 and which was supposed to close the concert, could not be played on the cathedral organ because a few of the required notes were missing is. Would that have happened to them at the Frauenkirche?
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