Unexpected Schönberg tones from Gustav Mahler, Johann Strauss and Maurice Ravel can be heard in the Mozarteum.
This review must begin with a confession. Was it the humid weather, overwork or just plain stupidity? The reporter thought he was sure that his concert on Saturday would start at 7:30 p.m. He arrived shortly after seven and found that the place was empty, no one there, and the event had already started at 7 p.m. sharp. A few hectic phone calls from the friendly admission staff resulted in him being refused entry because “the piece was too quiet for late arrivals.” What to do? The unsatisfactory solution: you could stand near the stage behind a door that allowed the music to pass through slightly. Until the break.
So now we have to choose the back door perspective. Gustav Mahler’s “Farewell” was played, the final movement of his “Song of the Earth”, arranged by Arnold Schönberg for a salon ensemble, heard here in a completed version by Rainer Riehn (Schönberg wanted to arrange the entire work for his association for private musical performances, but did not finish it). The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, with a wind and string quintet, along with piano, percussion, harmonium and celesta, was in top form – powerful, earthy, and sometimes rough. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner first offers a mezzo-soprano frenzy of flaring emotions before gently gliding into an almost eternal disappearance. Maxime Pascal conducts with drive, but without discipline, allowing individual sound figures to blossom, glow, quickly die out, and rise again. This can also be experienced through the door, including the trembling, draining, melting finale. Wonderful!
Then we finally go into the hall. And once again we hear Schönberg without Schönberg! Forget all the (non-)seriousness, his arrangement of Johann Strauss’ “Kaiserwalzer”, which here becomes a tap-dancing instrumental septet, with wonderful interventions, roughenings, small quotations and references to Schubert or even back to Joseph Haydn. It is virtuoso dance music, sometimes on the brink, but here too it is brought to life in a magnificent way.
The evening is concluded by what is possibly the craziest piece: “La Valse” by Maurice Ravel, scored for two pianos. Ravel himself played it with a colleague in 1920, and the profoundly tumbling ‘choreographies’ that are otherwise known from the overwhelming, lush orchestral part become a mirrored game that swings cheerfully at times and then runs against each other. Nenad Lečić and Tamara Stefanovich are engaged in true piano battles!
Chapeau for one of the most unusual concert programs from the witches’ kitchen of artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser and concert director Florian Wiegand, enthusiastically acclaimed by the audience.
The excellent program booklets for the Schönberg series are also worth mentioning. They supplement clever essays and notes on the pieces with illustrations of postcards, sketches, paintings and photos in a meaningful and sensual way – they are actually collector’s items. What you hear, however, goes into the inner archive of lasting impressions!
2024-08-04 12:51:04