Tdoes the appearance censure? As a spring idyll between blooming fruit trees and palm trees, the unreal beautiful, because super-romantic Heidelberg city panorama from the Philosophenweg presents itself as always, sunbathed, lying down on the Neckar. But it’s bitterly cold. In the sometimes wailing post-pandemic, does a similarly harsh climate also surround one of the most renowned, but only medium-sized German classical music festivals? There is no sign of it, now that things should be running again without any corona measures and everything is at the beginning, hardly anyone wears masks anymore and only admonish disinfectant dispensers as unused pandemic folklore.
Two years ago, director Thorsten Schmidt celebrated a quarter of a century of Heidelberg Spring as a digital festival – with many question marks. As a GmbH, you couldn’t register short-time work, you were deep in lockdown. What has grown steadily since 1997, which has expanded with satellites such as the String Quartet Festival, Song Festival, Song Center and Song Competition, Chamber Music+ around the actual music festival in March/April, is still quite powerful.
It is true that the historic Stadthalle on the banks of the Neckar, whose renovation and optimization was significantly promoted by the Spring founder Thorsten Schmidt, is not yet back as the main festival location and meeting place. Here, too, due to the Covid-19, the completion is postponed by a year; the premium venue is optimistically scheduled for spring 2025. That’s why in 2023 there will only be 108 events spread over the year, 83 of which will be held in spring at 25 venues spread across the city. Twelve of these will be played by the newly formed Festivalcampus ensemble, which emerged from the accompanying academies and currently replaces them, as well as the opening concert.
Under the ambiguous motto “Together”, big artists, some of whom play here regularly, come back to their audience, but also young people. “Together” also means that Schmidt, who is now in his 27th year as head, has appointed a co-artistic director: Star pianist Igor Levit, who has been closely associated with the Heidelberg Spring for a long time, is taking on the planning and responsibility; it is present in a wide variety of formats. And the Berlin office Boros has even had a new, somewhat stricter visual advertising appearance: The green band of hope still runs through all sound formats.
The new co-head of the Heidelberger Frühling: Igor Levit
Quelle: © Felix Broede
Heidelberg is a rich, proud city, many of the industrial bosses from Ludwigshafen and Mannheim lived here in the idyll. And even if there is a lot of empty space in the pedestrian zone, the Heidelberg Spring continues to flourish. One is still slowed down without a town hall, the pavilion in the courtyard of the new university, where both auditoriums are used, cannot really replace the center of the festival. Some things, like the music conference, have been ordered to take a break. And like everywhere else: bookings are made later, more spontaneously. But the audience, even newer, younger ones, it’s back.
Therefore, even on a Monday evening, there is top-class performance in the well-filled hall, such as the briskly playing Kammerakademie Potsdam, which, with the minimalist co-conducting viola virtuoso Antoine Tamestit, not only has Bach and Telemann, but also Schnittke and Shostakovich, which is highly enthusiastically appreciated. The additional 5 p.m. concerts are also very well received, where a newly mixed audience lets the day end early – not only baroque-chilling with the gamba consort Phantasm, which plays English string music.
More organ is not possible
The 5 p.m. track is also embedded in two days of concerts, which in cleverly mixed programs are dedicated to György Ligeti’s 100th birthday on May 28th. This may be possible in the big cities or in Witten and Donaueschingen, but it is not without risk in Heidelberg. But the applause at the crowded venues is similarly enthusiastic. For example, when the enthusiastic Markus Uhl, playing the two organs in the Jesuitenkirche, which is as austere as it is cheerful, confronts Bach’s top works with two of Ligeti’s only three unusual and groundbreaking organ explorations. Simultaneously handling keys, registers, blocks of lead and bellows, Uhl lets the instruments groan and snarl, groan hollowly, bleat, microtonally hover in the still “Étude 1: Harmonies” like the once scandalous “Volumina” and in the treble in clusters held under the arm voluminously roar. More organ is hardly possible.
But more Ligeti hardcore. In the evening, the Klangforum Wien started in the new auditorium, the conducting composer Péter Eötvös, a completely different Ligeti successor, not only scheduled the colorful chamber concert for 13 instruments, but also the highly important concertos for violin, cello and piano and that with three Hungarian virtuosos. Barnabás Kelemen, Lázló Fenyö and Zoltan Fejérvári play these complex and universal works in such a swinging, relaxed, beautiful and sovereign way that Kelemen even harmoniously incorporates Mozart’s alla turca ringtone of an insubordinate mobile phone in his final cadence.
A fine concert with the Quatuor Diotima ensemble, which intertwines Janacék’s “Kreuzersonate” quartet with the 1st Bartók quartet and the 2nd Ligeti quartet, is everyday life here. The concert in a Catholic concrete brutalist suburban church, where the wonderfully clear KlangForum Heidelberg mesmerizingly combines Renaissance polyphony with the soaring sound wonders of Ligeti’s three Hölderlin fantasies such as the unearthly long “Lux aeterna”, is really special and rare at festivals.
Just like the close connection with the recipient of the music award, which is endowed with 10,000 euros: His name is Martin Grubinger. The popular multi-percussionist, who has built up his own series of concerts over the last 23 years of his career, which has also been regularly spent in Heidelberg, is retiring at the end of the season – at the age of 40. Because his profession is also competitive sport. He will continue to teach, motivate.
Here in Heidelberg, where all the local fans have appeared, he transforms the ceremony into a brilliant percussion concert and introduces his successor: the 29-year-old percussionist Vivi Vassieva. In this way, the Heidelberg Spring cheerfully continues to weave its festival history.