Give the Austrian body politic a victim complex to nurse, and it will gladly let off xenophobic steam. By now this well-oiled masquerade is possessed with Pavlovian inevitability. So nothing unusual then, when populist indignation about perceived Austrian vulnerability to the ongoing Greek crisis rapidly descended into ugly national stereotyping.Measured relatively, this has been a mild outbreak.
Counting this present concert performance, public outings for Jaromir Weinberger’s 1937 opera Wallenstein may possibly have reached double digits, and such reception details, or indeed any information about the opera beyond a basic synopsis, would have made a welcome addition to the programme.
Born in 1920 to a Venetian bandmaster, Bruno Maderna became famous during his formative years as a violin prodigy and was told by his grandfather that he could gravitate to the mafia later in life and God would still look kindly on one who played the violin so wonderfully.
An aesthetic of tradition whose past appears as its present and vice versa, that resists or smudges the shifts of meaning which occur through time, informs music-making in Austria ranging from the waltzes performed by the Vienna Philharmonic on New Year’s Day to the more idiosyncratic impulses of Nikolaus Harnoncourt.
Faith and glamour have bookended this year’s Salzburg Festival, a move met with incredulity in certain quarters and yet one not entirely alien to Austrian customs, if one looks to the 20 or so most glittering events of the Viennese ball season, which is promptly curtailed by Ash Wednesday (still observed by much of the population here with high Catholic asceticism).
Having only heard Pierre-Laurent Aimard on disc for the last few years it was curious to experience something rather different in the flesh, by way perhaps of that phenomenon, so often invoked as to be meaningless, of the artist for whom two concerts are never the same.
Cornelius Meister has long been a champion of young Czech composer Miroslav Srnka, not only as chief conductor of the RSO Wien but also in Heidelberg, where he was Generalmusikdirektor from 2005 until earlier this year.
Over the 60 years of its existence, the Vienna Kammeroper has commissioned chamber operas by Maxwell Davies, Henze and Glass and made figures including Reimann and Birtwistle better known to the Viennese.
Grigory Sokolov’s annual visit to the Konzerthaus – always in December, always half-lit, always a lengthy affair – is an object of cultish appreciation for the Viennese, who are drawn to mystique like moths to a flame.
Institutional violence has been a running theme in Torsten Fischer’s series of Gluck operas at the Theater an der Wien, albeit with a lid kept firmly on the idea of actual conflict.
At this Mozart Saal recital the latest addition to the bumf which routinely overfills concert programmes was a flyer for an autumn sale at Austria’s main Steinway dealership, drawing one’s attention a fraction more than usual to the unremarkable fact that like the overwhelming majority of his colleagues, Ingolf Wunder is a Steinway artist.
The Klangforum Wien has had its own row of subscription concerts at the Konzerthaus for the past 22 seasons, and a constant during that time has been the regular programming of Austrian composers.
Following a string of misses, the Theater an der Wien emerges from its recent dry patch with a new production of Puccini’s triptych which offers a winning cast, the best playing heard at the house in months, and a smart production.
With sub-Ionesco doggerel for a libretto, a patchy score and a disjointed plot, it takes deft stage direction for farce and satire to blend credibly in Le grand macabre, Ligeti’s 1977 operatic spoof on doom-laden prophesizing.
Featuring seven concerts programmed according to nationality, the Klangforum Wien’s 22nd Konzerthaus subscription series, titled Europa, global, wants us to listen with socially conscious ears. The aim is to determine how globalization’s impact on cultural identity has influenced the musical avant-garde, defined conveniently as the music the Klangforum chooses to play.
Productions of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria which make the title character a returning war veteran, preferably one returning from a juicy topical war, are nothing new, and director Claus Guth doesn’t stretch the well-worn conceit much further in this listlessly vague staging for the Theater an der Wien.
The risen Christ and a dramatic figure who resists the Christian promise of redemption make for odd conceptual bedfellows, not least of all in a Vienna Philharmonic programme which here saw Messiaen’s L’Ascension sandwiched between the Schumann and Tchaikovsky treatments of Byron’s Manfred.
The position of Composer in Residence at the Grafenegg festival may as well be called Composer-Conductor in Residence, as the appointments of Tan Dun, HK Gruber, and now James MacMillan have established a tradition whereby the lucky candidates are not only required to be intimately involved with the programming and preparation of their music, but also to stand in front of an orchestra and lead the
The success of Grafenegg, a relative newcomer to the Austrian summer festival scene, lies in the timing: held in the last week of August and first week of September, the festival has become an additional tour date for international orchestras engaged at the BBC Proms and Salzburg and Lucerne festivals, as well as a stop for German orchestras looking to take their first concert of the new season on
There is a famous scene in the noir classic The Third Man in which Joseph Cotten returns to his hotel and is swiftly bundled into a cab that speeds off recklessly through the streets of Vienna.
