I still think that the height of luxury is getting up on a summer morning in Salzburg, having a nice breakfast and some good coffee, and strolling 100 metres or so to the Large Festival Hall to hear the Vienna Philharmonic play Mahler with Pierre Boulez at 11 a.m. There's a decadent, Viennese quality to this of course. And the Nordic version in turn has a brisker feel -- getting up on a late June morning, having a good breakfast, scrambling for some decent coffee, and walking a mile or more along the coast to a furniture showroom with a waterfront view to hear the Risör (on a Swedish keyboard today) Festival Strings play Haydn's "Morning" Symphony with Christian Tetzlaff as leader and concertmaster at 9:30 a.m.!
In a pretty ingenious move, the Festival programmed the three 1761 Haydn Symphonies No's. 6, 7, and 8, "Morning," "Noon," and "Evening" at the three called-for times Friday. The D Major "Morning," in the morning, with Tetzlaff was a lift for more than just a day. A musician of such a high level of ability and commitment he elevated his already excellent colleagues "simply" through his own example and inspiration. Ligeti's 1968 Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet with the Swiss hornist Bruno Schneider, Danish bassoonist Dag Jensen, and Swedish clarinetist Fredrik Fors, inter alia, and Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata with Liza Ferschtman accompanied by Nikolai Lugansky rounded out this early morning.
Before the C Major Haydn "Noon," midday started with Marc-André Hamelin piloting Leo Ornstein's 1915 Suicide in an Airplane at the Steinway concert grand. Ornstein (left, as a young man), you might recall, was the American-based virtuoso pianist and composer who withdrew from the performance and publishing world in the 1930s, when he was in his 40s, and managed to live on, in mostly good health, until his death in 2002 at 108 or 109. Airplane has been called "the ne plus ultra of pianistic violence . . . " but Hamelin made it sing. The young singers of the Norwegian Soloists and their director Grete Pedersen gave a phenomenally idiomatic performance of Messiaen's rarely tackled 1949 Cinq Rechants, a mystical spinning of the composer's own vision (and lyrics) of the Tristan legend, along with French vowels and pseudo-Sanskrit. And then the Swedish Fredrik Ullén gave Book Three (1995-97) and Book Two (1988-93) -- Book One was still to come -- of Ligeti's Piano Etudes. Ullén not only made the first full recording of all of Ligeti's piano works (in 1996), he made the first-ever recording of the second book of these astonishingly varied studies. What other festival would or even could have programmed this concert alone?
But the day was only half-done -- early evening started with Hamelin again, this time with Antheil's (left) minute and a half yet a night of music containing Jazz Sonata of 1923 -- he polishes these things off like finger exercises, yet with all the requisite heart and mind as well. Then Jan-Erik Gustafsson topped his already high earlier points with one of the finest Debussy 'Cello Sonata's I've heard, showing us, through clarity, focus, and empathy with Debussy's 1915 exploration, just what a daring work this is. Luganksy was his able piano partner.
German flutist Andrea Lieberknecht took these efforts across the Atlantic with Varèse's Density 21.5 of 1936 and then, with seven colleagues, his 1923 Octandre. The G Major Haydn "Evening" was a fine wrap-up of this trio of symphonies but all but vanished in the wake of Hamelin's performance of Ives's 1911-15 "Concord" Sonata (Concord, Mass. 1840-1860).
With all due respect to the many outstanding musicians here and the many exceptional performances of many a rarity or challenging work we heard, this was an experience that I am sure will stay with me for the rest of my life. Hamelin (left) plays Ives with the mind of a composer -- there is never an illogical moment or measure in his 40-minute traversal. Although he is meticulously faithful to the score, he seems to be improvising -- creating -- the work as he plays. With technique to burn he shows us not only what is striking in Ives's work -- the much commented on simultaneity of themes and styles, the idiosyncracy of his portraiture, the seeming cacaphonies -- but just how beautiful and inherently logical Ives is in his best works. Playing from memory (for a while this week the joke was that the pianist actually could not play from sheet music!) and with absolute concentration and command, Hamelin merged Ives's voyage and the senses of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau he invokes, with his own inner journey and that of the listening audience. In this little 17th century wooden fisherman's church, a French-Canadian took his Norwegian audience to places that the eccentric New Englander had dreamed others would hear but which they rarely, if ever, did in his lifetime. I'm still lost in the spell of that evening . . . .
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