ORFEO International – Reviews

Important Releases Briefly Introduced

August 2009

Salzburger Festspieldokumente 2009

Ever since its launch in 1992,
C 799 091 BOrfeo’s Salzburger Festspieldokumente series has showcased particularly memorable performances from the Salzburg Festival, and 2009 is no exception. No fewer than six new releases cover a whole range of genres, with the emphasis once again on the continuity of individual artists’ links with the Festival, often documenting their first appearances in Salzburg and occasionally taking the form of gratifying departures from the beaten track. Among this last-named category is our reissue of the first and, indeed, the only song recital that Lisa Della Casa gave in the Mozarteum in 1957 with Arpad Sándor at the piano. The legendary Swiss soprano, who this year celebrated her ninetieth birthday, was able to display her gifts to great and justified acclaim not only in songs by Richard Strauss but also in Romantic and late Romantic lieder by Schubert and Hugo Wolf as well as in a number of folksong arrangements by Brahms and Ravel.

The following year
C 798 091 BPierre Fournier made his belated Festival début, again at the Mozarteum, in a recital accompanied by the pianist Franz Holetschek. In the process he confirmed his reputation as the “aristocrat of the cello”, magisterially rising to the manifold challenges of his chosen programme and doing justice not only to the cantabile qualities of Brahms’s Second Cello Sonata op. 99, to the fury and technical recklessness of Kodály’s op. 8 and to the neoclassical form of Debussy’s Cello Sonata of 1915. His programme culminated in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations. It is no wonder, then, that in the wake of his brilliant début, Fournier was from then on a welcome visitor to the Salzburg Festival.

A further début in 1958
C 795 091 Bwas that of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, one of the most famous and versatile orchestras in the world. The Concertgebouw gave five concerts that summer, the first of which was devoted to Mozart, with the two G minor Symphonies K 183 and K 550 framing the E flat major Piano Concerto K 449. Even in a live performance, Wolfgang Sawallisch phrases the music with extreme precision, proving himself as great a Mozartian as he had proved himself a great Wagnerian when making his Bayreuth Festival début in 1957 at the helm of Tristan und Isolde. No less acclaimed by this date in his career was the soloist, Friedrich Gulda, whose performance provided the concert with its point of calm repose, countering virtuoso expectations and in that way anticipating the musical “chameleon” of the later period.

The Salzburg performances of
C 796 091 BWilhelm Backhaus, by contrast, all had something imperturbably monumental about them. For Backhaus, 2009 marked a double anniversary – the 125th anniversary of his birth and the fortieth of his death. The Austrian Radio archives contain tapes of him playing two concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic under Karl Böhm, the first from 1960, the second from 1968, on both occasions in the Großes Festspielhaus, neither performance showing any signs of artistic compromise in spite of Backhaus’s advancing years. To Mozart’s final piano concerto, K 595 in B flat major, he brings extreme delicacy and a sense of rapt otherworldliness, whereas Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto has all the weight of tone that one could possibly want not only in the work’s chordal textures but also in its pounding passage-work. Nor is the concerto’s careful structure neglected by Böhm, who was no less strict with himself than he was with his partners when it was a question of imposing his commanding grasp of architectural form on a piece.

That the “impossible art form” of opera may occasionally require the ordering hand of a strong directorial team and that such an approach may pay handsome dividends was demonstrated by the version of Jacques Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann on which Jean-Pierre Ponnelle and James Levine collaborated in the early 1980s, a production guaranteed to cast its bewitching spell on Salzburg audiences.
C 793 093 DThe production opened in 1981 and is captured here in its 1982 revival, when its protagonist, Plácido Domingo, was at the very peak of his form. Appearing alongside him were two brilliant young female singers, Catherine Malfitano, who successfully faced up to the challenge of singing all three of Hoffmann’s loves, Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta, and Ann Murray, who was ideally cast in the double role of Niklausse and Hoffmann’s Muse, her solo numbers a notable feature of Fritz Oeser’s new performing edition of the score and, as such, largely unfamiliar to the majority of the audience. With the mercurial José van Dam in the role of the four villains and with James Levine’s unerring instinct for the theatre firing the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit, Offenbach’s opéra fantastique was brought to vibrant life.

First staged in 1990,
C 794 092 IHans Werner Henze’s opera Das verratene Meer is based on Yukio Mishima’s novel Gogo no eiko (The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea) and harks back to the traditions of literary naturalism and the verismo of early 20th-century music theatre. At the suggestion of the conductor Gerd Albrecht, Henze prepared a Japanese version of the score that was performed for the first time in Salzburg in 2006. Under Albrecht’s direction, the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI gave a sympathetic account of an iridescent score that ranges from exotic reminiscences of Japan to the impressions of a large city and from the atmospheric portrait of a doomed love story to a drama about juvenile violence, all of which strands are tightly interwoven right up to the moment of the final fatal confrontation in the closing scene of the opera. The cast includes three outstanding singing actors, the soprano Mari Midorikawa, the tenor Jun Takahashi and the baritone Tsuyoshi Mihara, all of whom create gripping portraits of the widow Fusako Kuroda, her thirteen-year-old son and the boy’s stepfather. The recording affords further proof of the Salzburg Festival’s ongoing commitment to broadening its repertory and to its desire to juxtapose the old and the new in thrilling ways that never compromise on quality.