Concert review – Salzburg: Christian Thielemann’s winter storms in autumn
The Salzburg Easter Festival on All Saints’ Day? The Habitués could not be deterred from the unfamiliar appointment and streamed in large numbers to the catch-up date in the Great Festival Hall.
The focus of the four-day festival on Sunday evening was an acclaimed concert with excerpts from Richard Wagner’s “Ring”. In the first “Walküre” elevator, which is suitable for concerts, an experienced Wälsung couple comes together. Stephen Gould still has almost infinite powers with his baritone-based tenor, so that Siegmund’s Wälse calls seemed to shake the foundations of the Festspielhaus. Anja Kampe sang them with a confident and shining soprano, albeit more distant than her colleague and with a less clear diction. But she was also challenged twice, because in the second part she still had to cope with Brünnhilde’s gnawing final song from “Götterdämmerung”, in which her resonance and color shone. René Pape added to the “Walküre” solo tents as a distinguished and imposing Hunding.
With their current chief conductor Christian Thielemann, the Staatskapelle Dresden bedded the soloists on a differentiated soundscape that did not induce them to force, but at the same time left room for the dramatic outbursts. In the orchestral interludes and in the final scene from “Götterdämmerung” after the break, Thielemann and the orchestra are at the center, in which they “staged” the multi-interwoven leitmotifs so effectively that you forgot to only sit in one concert.
The previous day’s program under Daniele Gatti was only solid, in which this year’s winner of the Herbert von Karajan Prize Hilary Hahn enriched Mozart’s A major violin concerto KV 219 with her own cadenzas, which ties in with the rest of the romantic program.