Dhe old lady looks a little grimly across the beach to the east. No wonder. The Statue of Liberty and the New York Philharmonic took up residence on Usedom for almost a week. The island in the Baltic Sea is unofficially called Miss Liberty Island at this time.
The six meter high statue, which was made by a theater sculptor who usually works for the Stralsund Festival, looks straight towards Poland. After all, at the eastern end of the German island of Swinemünde lies what is now called Swinoujscie. And a few hundred kilometers further, on the next border, which is not so easy to cross, is the Ukrainian city of Lviv.
Vladimir Putin’s war rockets, which recently killed the 96-year-old Ukrainian Holocaust survivor Boris Romanschenko in Charkiv, shoot that far. He had survived four concentration camps, including a few months as a forced laborer at the Peenemünde Army Research Institute at the age of 17, where he had to assemble the V2 rockets under the supervision of Wernher von Braun. Braun later went to America to work for NASA.
The New York Philharmonic was a guest at the Historical Technical Museum for three concerts with 110 musicians and 30 accompanying members (including a mental coach). This is housed in the former combined heat and power plant, which was operated by Nazis, Russians and East German troops until 1990.
Anne-Sophie Mutter is honored
There, in turn, the Usedom Music Festival has been holding concerts for 20 years. Starting with Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, which his friend Mstislav Rostropovich conducted.
Now, a little outside of the usual festival season in September/October, Mecklenburg’s Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig and the member of the Bundestag Philipp Amthor together with other local celebrities are sitting in the front row, listening to Anne-Sophie Mutter, who came with a stylist for the artistically tousled hairstyle, and forgetting for a moment few hours their acute worries.
Incidentally, ten years ago Kurt Masur attended the Usedom Music Festival for the first time, and he came three more times until his death in 2015: listening, teaching, and very briefly conducting. This is how the idea of a residency for his last orchestra came about, which could now be realized shortly before the Americans start the 22/23 season with a post-pandemic thirst for action.
Anne-Sophie Muttter with Jaap van Zweden on Usedom
Source: @Peter Adamik
In a very special way. This orchestra had also been silent for almost two years. During the pandemic, people managed – like most other American cultural institutions hardly supported by the state – with virtual and small neighborhood concerts all over the city.
Artistic director Deborah Borda is America’s most important music businesswoman. A small, nervous, fast-talking bundle of energy. She lets her orchestra with its own unit for the longest time, greets you with your elbow when you meet them for the first time, but shakes your hand again at the end.
After years of planning, she managed to open the completely renovated Geffen Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center in October. Half cheaper and much earlier than scheduled because during the pandemic the orchestra was hardly able to perform in other places that were expensive to rent.
The orchestra, always a sleek, sometimes cutting-sounding machine, has been used to acoustic problems in its own home for decades. The poorly selective but tolerable sound possibilities of the former turbine hall cannot be shocking. You master them in a relaxed, professional, boasting manner, but never brutally.
The New Yorkers have a tough program under the direction of Dutch perfectionist Jaap van Zweden, whose contract runs out for two years. Shostakovich’s 9th symphony, Bartók’s concerto for orchestra, Dvorak’s 7th symphony, finally taken with a light, radiant melody.
Music by contemporaries, blacks, women
The otherwise sensitive Polish-born Canadian Jan Lisiecki has to assert himself in an orchestrally bridled 5th Beethoven piano concerto. Anne-Sophie Mutter has the violin concerto written for her by her ex-husband André Previn, which is a little soapy but played with gleaming sinewy.
The American baritone Thomas Hampson still sings impressive orchestral songs by the former Philharmonic chief conductor Gustav Mahler. And there are also a few upbeat contemporary music by blacks (Lyric for Strings by George Walker) and women (Nina Shekar, Joan Tower).
Concert headquarters of the Usedom Music Festival
Source: © Geert Maciejewski
Music by Russians, Hungarians, Czechs, KuK-Austrians, Germans, Americans, by opponents of the regime, emigrants, Jews, the disadvantaged. You don’t have to keep talking about reconciliation, remembrance, freedom and peace, especially in music phrases that tend to sound hollow, many extra-musical contextualisations could be felt here, at the first European guest performance of a happily excited US orchestra in more than two years this historically oppressive place. When Mahler’s unromantic soldiers’ songs ring out in Peenemünde, the walls of the rocket factory remnants echo back in a very unique way.
Of course, it wasn’t all cheap. In addition to EU funds, the state has donated 910,000 euros as a measure to promote tourism. The top price of 400 euros was paid in the almost sold-out concerts, each with a capacity of 1200 spectators.
Who is now stepping in as a sponsor for Nord Stream?
But after a lot of symbolic official fanfare, it ended gently: with a side-by-side education project in the form of two cheerful chamber concerts, where six NY Phil musicians played alongside five members of the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, which is also supported by the Usedom Music Festival (who are also in played in the orchestral concerts) in Heringsdorf and Wolgast intoned Barber, Mozart and Brahms.
And again the audience applauded enthusiastically between the sentences. At the same time, an orchestra that landed in Newark was lucky about the intensively dense music days together on a Baltic Sea island that presented itself as a sunny place in chestnut, rhododendron, lilac and tulip blossoms after the initial storm clouds.
Only director Thomas Hummel now has to think about how he will replace the long-stopped Nord Stream 2 sponsorship money for the project orchestra, which consists of young musicians from all ten countries bordering the Baltic Sea (yes, also Russia) from 2023…