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When Patricia Kopatchinskaja, after an intensive concert, works late into the night to hand over the piano notes to the director of the Salzburg Festival alongside the premiere of "Everyman", it is clear: something extraordinary occurs.
July 1968
Galina Ustvolskaya received a tribute to the Mozarteum on Sunday evening. An experience between monotony and the monument. The Russian composer, who included Hinterhäuser before her death in 2006 in a list of only five names, which allowed her to be considered an interpreter of her works, is a singularity in twentieth century music. Student – but not admirer – of Shostakovich, so independent and satisfied in his radical gesture that she is hardly worthy of a line with other avant-garde. For the "Time with Ustvolskaya", which pbades the festival in the context of the Spiritual Overture, one therefore tries wider fields of concepts of tension and kinship.
Her works are combined here with a 1920s Jeanne Arc silent film, with Franz Liszt's Via Crucis or Renaissance funeral music – relationships that do not open. not at first glance, not even the second, but resonate on an inner level of idiosyncratic, even stubborn, spirituality that resonates with their own The creators have tried to come together by strategies of fracture and reduction. In Liszt's experimental "Via Crucis" for piano and choir, there is only violence and silence, with inter-devotional, unfounded holes, the performance of Igor Levit at the piano, the BR choir sings with lightness and nobility
Hinterhäuser and Patricia Kopatchinskaja with two works for piano and violin, which Ustvolskaya did not want to call "chamber music". In fact, the two voices are too lascivious for the term, work side by side on a common solitude, always under high tension, with hair rolled up and a look lost in a heterogeneous and non-linear sound space. Kopatchinskaya, like Igor Levit, belongs to the uncompromising and charismatic musicians of the younger generation, who manage to combine the finest of music with the unconditional conviction that it is about nothing less.
Almost two hours break. At 10 pm, as the "Everyman" prepares for the first death of the rich man this summer, festival director Markus Hinterhäuser returns to the piano, Patricia Kopatchinskaja at his side – this time to turn the page . And the almost sculptural work on a cycle of works begins, which pushes the piano, the pianist and the listeners to their limits. For the description of the six solo piano sonatas – written between 1947 and 1988 – the metaphors of rock are often used, sculpture and carving on indomitable materials, a violent act and at the same time profoundly aesthetic. Hinterhauser has already recorded the monumental cycle, with explosions exploding on its senses, during a monotony progressively progressing on CD. This makes the night effort no less difficult – not less physically, when the keyboard with fingers, palms, entire forearms are real acts of manual force to do. But above all emotionally: the music of Ustvolskaya asks to be delivered to it. Their claim to the absolute has something provocative, also a little vain, it makes skeptical and capture.
Today, Monday evening, "The time with Ustvolskaya" continues with instrumental works religiously entitled in dialogue with "Exequia musical" Heinrich Schütz of 1636 – Collegium Vocale Gent and Klangforum Wien play. The series ends Tuesday with the performance of Symphonies Two and Three, as well as with the Klangforum. Even before the official opening of the Salzburg Festival next Friday, Ustvolskaya focus will be played. The opening speech – on the Enlightenment – then retains the historian Philipp Blom. Director Markus Hinterhäuser has already given his personal musical commitment for the launch of the festival.
(S E R V I C E -)
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