Review of concerts at the Salzburg Festival

Everything in the concert program of the Salzburg Festival reminds of stability in an unstable world: from Henry Purcell to Alfred Schnittke, from Grigory Sokolov to Patricia Kopatchinskaya. listened to Alexey Mokrousov.

A red sofa in the center of the stage, flowers, jars and bottles on chairs, a floor lamp and a piano, someone in the lotus position is sitting on the floor, people with a vacuum cleaner and a broom are wandering around. Least of all it looks like the beginning of a concert. It is no coincidence that they vacuum and sweep for a long time: the violinist Patricia Kopachinskaya always plays barefoot, but even at her concerts they rarely conduct with a broom. The rhythmic movements of the cleaner turn into the movements of the conductor, the stick with a rag turns into a conductor’s baton. For “Living Room Music” by John Cage, this is a worthy start, but not the end: the piece is played throughout the evening. Between its parts is placed the entire program, sometimes parody-joking, sometimes frankly scurrilous. Here are the opuses of both Schnittke and Kopatchinskaya herself, who acts as a composer under the pseudonym Patkop, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and fragments of Ligeti’s Grand Macabre, the main absurdist opera of the 20th century, whose name is not very successfully translated here as “The Great Deadviarch”. So Kopachinskaya, who both sings and conducts and who has long been cramped in the role of a violinist, paid tribute to the main character of this year’s concerts, György Ligeti (1923–2006), and coincided with the cross-cutting theme of this year’s Salzburg Festival.

In fact, the intendant of the festival, Markus Hinterhäuser, does not like slogans. But this festival has an epigraph, a “direction for reflection” — it is a quotation from Hamlet, with which Hinterhäuser begins the introduction to the program. The phrase “the time is out of joint”, “the connection of times has broken up”, as you know, in translations sounds differently, from Pasternak’s “the connecting thread of the days has broken” to the laconic version of Anna Radlova “the eyelid will dislocate”.

Few can be put on a par with Ligeti, because few thought as intensely as he did about the nature of time, both in literary texts and in creativity. After leaving Hungary in 1956, Ligeti lived several lives. He was fond of electronic music, was friends with Stockhausen, developed a special technique of polyphonic composition known as micropolyphony, wrote excellent musicological articles, sued, and then collaborated with Stanley Kubrick, who used his works in both A Space Odyssey and The Shining, and in the last tape “Eyes Wide Shut”. At the same time, unlike Schnittke, with whom he was related by a love for the music of the past, Ligeti was not a film composer, he managed to earn a living with “pure music”, his “Requiem” was recorded more than once, awards rained down on him endlessly, among them the prize Kyoto.

There is a lot of chamber music at the festival, although the French orchestra Les siecles conducted by François-Xavier Roth devoted an entire program to his orchestral works, and Isabella Faust, who was the soloist that evening, as well as pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, played more than once in the cycle “Time with Ligeti ”, including in a concert of soloists, unique in terms of the quality of performance, who presented a mini-history of Hungarian music of the 20th century. The fantastic Jean-Guyen Queiras performed the Kodály cello sonata, Faust the Bartok violin sonata, and Tabéa Zimmermann the Ligeti viola sonata.

In other concerts, his music is side by side with the works of Brahms and Reich, Richard Strauss and Henry Purcell. The latter became the joker of the concert poster, Grigory Sokolov devoted a whole section to him, creating a forty-minute meditative masterpiece from the study suites and the chaconne. After the intermission, it was time for Mozart, who also sounded in the traditional third “encore”, this time unexpectedly short, less than half an hour.

Purcell also reigned in the programs of a new format for Salzburg – “Little Night Music”. At ten in the evening in Edmundsburg Castle – Stefan Zweig once lived in it – 70-minute concerts of the Austrian baritone Georg Nigl, clavichord player Alexander Gergelifi and the outstanding German actor Ulrich Neten began, you can listen to it without even understanding the language, the plot is told by intonation. Purcell, Bach, Mozart, modern prose writers, arias and suites, an old clavichord and two modern copies of the instrument – and all this for only 60 guests. It is not known whether it will be possible to restore the connection of times in this way, but why not try.