Teodor Currentzis conducts at the Salzburg Festival – Culture
Salzburg is elegantly immersed in the festival tourist mode in bright sunshine. Nothing reminds us that the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is killing less than 2,000 kilometers from here. Everyday things like hunger, anti-Semitism and despotism seem unreal. And yet this is the theme at the opening of the concert program of this year’s Salzburg Festival, at the “Ouverture Spiritual”. And not only because festival director Markus Hinterhäuser programmed key music against oppression and the Holocaust in two concerts with pieces by Luigi Nono and Dmitri Shostakovich, but also because of the personnel Teodor Currentzis.
Born in Athens and socialized in Russia, the conductor is a brilliant eccentric, a box office magnet, a mystic and a central figure in Salzburg since Hinterhäuser’s first festival edition in 2017. Since the beginning of the war, however, Currentzis has come under increasing criticism. Mainly because his ensemble in Saint Petersburg”musicAeterna“, it includes choir, orchestra and administrative apparatus, is largely sponsored by a Russian bank that is on the EU sanctions lists. How close is Currentzis to Putin? Unlike his colleague Valery Gergiev or the singer Anna Netrebko, who oscillates between East and West, he has never explicitly spoken out in favor of Putin.
In summery Salzburg nobody is demonstrating in front of the Great Festival Hall
But Currentzis has been silent since the beginning of the war. This has angered some commentators. Managers like Hinterhäuser or the SWR, whose orchestra he directs, show understanding for this silence. He can, so the argument goes, openly criticize neither Putin nor the war, which would endanger not only him but also his ensemble in Russia. However, Currentzis is taking an artistic stand against the war, so he toured with a Russian-Ukrainian-German program. Is this enough? The Ukrainian Ambassador in Austria has in the Kronenzeitung declares that Currentzis belongs to the Putin system. However, Currentzis remains silent, but Hinterhäuser, SWR and others Tuesday are still holding on to him, he is also to conduct the first Salzburg opera premiere next year. Will the conductor’s silence be enough to withstand the pressure, which will surely increase by then, also in parts of the press?
In summery Salzburg, no one is demonstrating in front of the Great Festival Hall, where Currentzis is conducting Shostakovich’s rarely performed Thirteenth. In the end there are two short boos in the stormy final applause, which can also be artistic. Although the master motivates the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, the men of the Salzburg Bach Choir and musicAeterna as well as the grandiosely telling bassist Dmitry Ulyanov to a gripping interpretation, the outbursts die out powerfully, despair appears in the deepest darkness, flatters the artist’s pride and also the light cheerfulness with which this often wild and desperate one-hour song ends tenderly.
Shostakovich sets five poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017), who became world famous in 1961 at the age of twenty with his “Babi Yar”, which is also the subtitle of the symphony. The title refers to a Gorge near Kyiv, in which the Germans murdered well over 30,000 Jewish women, children and men in 1941. However, like the other poems in the symphony, it is above all a self-reflection of the poet, who accuses anti-Semitism worldwide as in the Soviet Union. In the other plays, Yevtushenko talks self-confidently and probably patriotically about his everyday life in Moscow, reflects on the fear of informers, the function of jokes (which is not only sarcastic for him and Shostakovich), poor women, careerism. This is unusually open and socially critical, which was possible in the politically somewhat more relaxed years after Stalin’s death in 1953.
A rift opens between the horror of Babyn Jar’s bestial murders and this gripping performance
As a contemporary document, these poems and this symphony are extremely interesting, and the music leaves no emotional mood unfulfilled to keep the audience engaged, and Currentzis helps with that. Nevertheless, a rift opens up between the horror of the bestial murders of Babyn Jar and a performance that the art-loving audience enjoys in the safety of the Festspielhaus. War, hunger, anti-Semitism, despotism, see above, are far from Salzburg. In addition, neither Yevtushenko nor Shostakovich nor Currentzis succeeds in transforming all this horror into art in such a way that it becomes significantly more than just enjoying art. Perhaps because all three aesthetic means remain non-binding, because they try to capture the horror with natural means, which in its excess calls for other, radical means? Or is it also a bit because Currentzis, like Shostakovich before him, opposes despotism and arbitrariness musically, but does not express himself in this direction and therefore has at least a small problem of credibility?
Luigi Nono, a generation younger than Shostakovich, was very different. The Venetian lived in a free country, he was loudly committed to communism in words and music, but was able to criticize the shabby Soviet communism in 1982, in “Quando stanno morendo”, radically set for four extremely led female voices, flute, cello, live -Acoustics. In the Kollegienkirche and after the Shostakovich concert, the horror of oppression has an aesthetically much stronger effect on the grandiose musicians of Cantando Admont and Klangforum Wien, led by Sylvain Cambreling, than on Shostakovich. Here there is no rift between the world and art. Because Nono, who composed his piece twenty years after the Thirteenth, has found a new and radical tonal language made up of heavy, boring and reflective elements that capture the horror more concisely than Shostakovich does with his clearly traditional means. Nono’s music is harsher, less sensual, more aggressive than Shostakovich’s. For this reason, however, she brings the horror of the world directly into the listener’s consciousness without giving up the autonomy of art.