On Thursday night at the Kulturpalast, the Dresden Music Festival public renewed their love affair with Jan Vogler, the festival's Intendant and seafaring cellist. They fell in love for the first time with the Southern charms of the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini from Parma, making their festival debut. And they had an encounter of the third kind with Omer Meir Wellber.
In the prelude to Verdi's Macbeth the woodwinds and brass shimmered and shone their relaxed, more Italianate colors and phrasings making them an ideal partner to Vogler's questing for humanity like a medieval pilgrim in Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto. The violas were sweet and restrained at the opening Moderato, and the horn throughout was splendidly forthright. Vogler's harmonics with the celesta were magical with an almost human vibrato, and his crablike maneuvers in thumb position and other death-defying cellistic gymnastics always ended with the cellist triumphantly flourishing his bow in the air. The finale might have been more cruelly sardonic in the the Soviet style but perhaps the time for such rhetoric is past. Vogler played the Sarabande from Bach's C major Suite for an encore. It had impulsive warmth that, as always with this great artist, curves with the lines of the music to embrace the audience.
The Act 1 prelude to Lohengrin provided a softly redemptive context for Tchaikovsky's Pathétique, the slight uncertainties seemed to be the human failings that are made to bloom through their growth into radiance; the cumulative impact of the brass entrance when everything was totally in synch reminded us how much is sacrificed to precision.
As Wellber raised his baton for the Tchaikovsky, he glanced nervously around the orchestra once or twice. He is thin and intense at the podium, a little stiff at the shoulders. His angularities are offset by the pleading he does for more expressivity, by his athletic half-kneeling for sudden cautions about speed or volume. He sometimes stops conducting just to listen.
However, when he brought the baton down and the orchestra had played the first two bars in a particularly ominous, Phrygian whisper, the stage lights flickered and stayed off for a few seconds before coming back on again. When Wellber tried to continue, the stage lights went out completely. When they came back on, he shrugged to the audience and started again. Afterwards, the orchestra gave a superbly rational misterioso intro into to the first movement leading to playing of the famous big theme sanctified by simplicity and purity. Just as the clarinets and bassoons were being enchantingly expressive, the lights flickered again just before the bigger statement of the theme but Wellber took no notice. From then on he and the orchestra filled the Kulturpalast with audiophile sound. At times in the first movement, the orchestra's awesome brass made it seem like we were entering the depths of hell.
The string section sang the Allegro con grazia with clean lines of movement, all about pacing, balancing and the Russian love of the dance. Wellber wanted his Allegro molto vivace fast and spectral, and it was hair-raising indeed, after which he willed them to a blazing climax. He was determined to wring everything out of the pleading chromatic upbeats in the Finale. At the end, after the horns had sounded their strange muted notes and the music stopped, Wellber let the last sounds of the Parma orchestra die out in the hall for over 30 seconds before lowering his arms to let the applause come forth. The Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana made a lovely encore.
