SALZBURG, Austria – The Salzburg Festival, the toniest of the big European summer arts festivals, has long traded on the world’s top starpower. No more gleaming stars of classical music illuminated Mozart’s town this month than Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, although opera, theater and many concerts and recitals also packed the season, which ended on Tuesday.
If the Italian maestro is a beloved fixture of the festival, the CSO is a prodigal guest. By his reckoning, the CSO music director has led 220 performances of opera and concerts here since his Salzburg debut 41 years ago, most of them involving the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. This year was somewhat different, with Muti conducting the CSO’s first concerts in Salzburg since 1994 to launch their first European tour together since he took up his Chicago post a year ago. The tour continues to Sept. 7.
Muti also led the Vienna Philharmonic in performances of the Verdi Requiem and a new production of Verdi’s “Macbeth.” I caught the latter amid a week of opera and concerts in halls that were an air-conditioned relief from the atypical 90-degree heat and humidity.
The new “Macbeth,” staged by the veteran German director Peter Stein, was Muti’s farewell to opera in Salzburg. The reason, as the Italian maestro told me over dinner at the Stiftskeller St. Peter (Austria’s oldest restaurant, which dates back to the year 803), is that he wants to cut back on his podium time now that he has reached the venerable age of 70.
“I spent 45 days in Salzburg this summer,” Muti said. “For more than four decades I have spent most of my summers here. I love Salzburg. I love the Vienna Philharmonic. I have given so much here, and they have given me so much. But we have only one life. I can’t predict how long mine will be.” A faint smile crossed his noble Neapolitan visage. From now on, “I feel I have to think a little bit more about me.”
Muti has made it clear on other occasions that he’s through working with cutting-edge European stage directors who think they know better than the composers about how the composers’ operas should be done. So-called “Eurotrash” productions have become increasingly prominent among the Salzburg offerings, severely testing the loyalty, not to mention pocketbooks, of dressy festival regulars. This year’s top opera tickets, including those for the Muti “Macbeth,” fetched as much as $537. (The two CSO concerts went for a relatively modest $218 each; the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic concerts, for $290.)
Fortunately a strong bond of trust exists between Muti and Stein, and they arrived at a dramatic concept that jibed with the maestro’s come scritto (as written) musical view of the Verdi work. (“Everything I asked him to remove, he did,” Muti told me.) The production was traditional, conservative, respectful of Verdi’s detailed theatrical specifications. Although not much to look at, it was a feast for the ears, with superior singing and orchestral playing under the baton of today’s foremost Verdi conductor.
Stein and his set designer, Ferdinand Wogerbauer, exploited the wide stage and towering stone wall at the rear of the cavernous Felsenreitschule, a riding academy in centuries past. Russian soprano Tatiana Serjan, the mesmerizing Lady Macbeth, traversed the uppermost tier during the orchestral introduction to the sleepwalking scene, capping it off with an ethereal high D flat, just as Verdi intended. The chorus of witches were dressed as plants and shrubs, Banquo’s assassins were stationary trees, and a spectacular battle scene took over the entire stage before Macbeth’s dying arioso, which Muti interpolated from Verdi’s 1847 original.
Indeed, both Serjan and Zeljko Lucic, the admirable Serbian bass-baritone who sang Macbeth, rose to particular distinction in their final scenes. I have heard deeper, darker Macbeth voices but few as musical as Lucic’s. Another fine performance came from Italian tenor Giuseppe Filianoti as Macduff, whose lament for his slain children (whose corpses lay at his feet) and oppressed homeland was beautifully taken. (It’s worth noting that Filianoti will be returning to Lyric Opera this fall as Edgardo in “Lucia di Lammermoor.”) Dmitry Belosselskiy made a strong Banquo.
Even so, the musical nerve center of this “Macbeth” was Muti. Treating the score like orchestral and vocal chamber music, he secured playing and singing of fervor, warmth, color and refinement. Although rather less taut and exciting overall than his 1976 EMI recording, his reading was exceptional for its in-depth revelation of the light and shade Verdi poured into the 1865 revision of the score he prepared for the Paris Opera. The ballet sequence was retained as a purely orchestral interlude before Act 3. Too bad a silly dream-sequence of scampering balletic children was not dropped.
A prolonged ovation followed the performance, with the entire ensemble joining the audience in saluting Muti’s arrivederci to opera in Salzburg. A chorister stepped forward to give him a bouquet on behalf of the Vienna State Opera Chorus, which the maestro gratefully accepted. Too bad the production will not wind up on home video: a planned TV broadcast was called off after Muti would not agree to terms set by ORF, the Austrian radio and television company. (All he would tell me about the contretemps was that money was not the deal breaker.)
Too bad the subtlety and fineness of musical sound Muti brought to the Verdi was missing from Yannick Nezet-Seguin’s conducting of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” which was given as part of the trilogy of Mozart/Da Ponte operas (the others being “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi Fan Tutte”) directed by German regisseur Claus Guth at this year’s festival. Nezet-Seguin’s fast and furious tear through the overture was all too symptomatic of the blunt hand he applied to the rest of the opera.
But, then, he may only have been translating Guth’s sour updating into sound. This restudied mounting of the German director’s 2008 “Don Giovanni” stuck to the cynical modern trend of removing any vestiges of giocoso (playful) from Mozart’s dramma giocoso.
The action was set entirely in a dark forest populated by outcasts and losers. Giovanni (the splendid baritone Gerald Finley) and his sidekick Leporello (a twitchy Adrian Sampetrean) were co-dependent drug abusers who shot up together. Fatally wounded by the Commendatore (a miscast Franz-Josef Selig), Finley’s glum, neurotic Don spent his remaining hours lurching from one meaningless seduction to the other, only to be tossed into an open grave dug by the Commendatore at the end.
At least the stylish German soprano Dorothea Roeschmann, the only holdover from the original cast, made the most of the director’s revisionist view of Donna Elvira, delivering a lovely “Mi tradi.” Malin Bystrom and Joel Prieto barely related to one another as a slutty Donna Anna and an ineffectual Don Ottavio. The peasant couple, Christiane Karg as Zerlina and Adam Plachetka as Masetto, didn’t fare much better. Altogether a depressing evening at a festival where Mozart has long been treated like a priceless porcelain heirloom.
What a resilient group of musicians the Vienna Philharmonic is! Pushed to coarseness by Nezet-Seguin in Mozart, later in the week they were back to playing like the mellifluous band they are at a matinee concert directed by Franz Welser-Most. His program held Gustav Mahler’s transcription for string orchestra of the Schubert String Quartet in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”) and Alexander Zemlinsky’s “Lyric Symphony,” a lush song-symphony clearly inspired by Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.”
No string choir in the world commands the golden sonic glow, the long and close identification with Schubert’s music, enjoyed by that of the Vienna Philharmonic. Welser-Most shaped the Mahlerized Schubertian lines with cool classical order, summoning more ardor for the surges of late-Romantic longing and leave-taking that sweep through the Zemlinsky. Although Christine Schafer’s soprano proved a bit light for a part calling for a dramatic soprano, she sang intelligently and well, as did the heroic-sounding baritone, Michael Volle.
Twitter @johnvonrhein
