Festival Overview
“Over the course of it’s 40 years history the Dresden Music Festival has established itself as distinctive cultural institution in Dresden and attracts an audience far beyond Germany’s borders between May and June to this city on the River Elbe. During three festival weeks renowned orchestras, top-class soloists and ensembles come to Dresden to perform at the most beautiful venues in its historic center and surroundings and fill the city with music…”
Artistic Director: Jan Vogler
Tuesday 1 June 2022
Culture Palace
Chamber Orchestra of Europe
Magdalena Kozena Mezzo-soprano
Andrew Staples Tenor
Sir Simon Rattle Conductor
Strauss Metamorphosen
Mahler Das Lied von der Erde
The Review
Dresden is looking very smart these days and, judging by the number of visitors thronging the central square, the Neumarkt, and its cafés, doing very nicely in the early Summer sunshine.
Nonetheless there is something stern about the Saxon capital. It’s baroque buildings emphasise classical formality with little room for frippery and so the modernist severity of the Culture Palace cube seems less out of place that it would do in a city that was more relaxed.
The Dresden Music Festival serves its patron a feast in May and early June that does not deal in trifles either. There’s no pavement music or bunting across the streets, no face painting or foyer fun. The concerts are in the concert hall and don’t bother to compromise by trying to look festive. In fact, unless you really search, it would be hard to know a festival was happening. That diffidence seems to be true of the enormously imposing opera house too – the Semperoper (named after its sombre but politically revolutionary architect, Gottfried Semper) – for you have to be determined to find a board telling you what’s on – one hidden in the doorway of the main entrance and one round the back on the modern office block that also – if you look hard enough – houses the box office. This preserves opera’s exclusivity, of course, but it means managers can hardly complain when they are accused of being unwelcoming.
That exclusive severity seemed to apply to the Culture Palace as well. To be fair there were flags outside and the staff on the doors were helpful and smiling but the stark entrance was a chilly introduction to glorious music making – the very opposite of the Proms. And the programme was glorious. This year I was only passing through but the night before I arrived the festival had the London Philharmonic with Thomas Ades conducting his own music and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. The night I left I could have heard the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Ivan Fischer playing Mahler’s Fourth too.
In between, Simon Rattle proved what a deep thinking conductor he has become in a performance of Metamorphosen from the 23 solo strings of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe that was as politically relevant as it was musically incomparable. At a moment when Russia is doing to the cities of Eastern Ukraine what Allied Bomber Command did to Dresden, the cry of grief and plea for compassionate humanity that Strauss wrote at the end of World War II was deeply poignant.
I have been travelling with the COE, so I am biased about the excellence of the players, but I cannot hide the superb way every detail of this complex score was revealed, every solo entry contributing to the discussion without interrupting and then slotting back into the ensemble. At the end I, and they, were drained.
The peculiarities of the hall’s acoustic made the balance in Das Lied von der Erde difficult and not wholly satisfactory (it was far better the following night in Luxembourg’s Philharmonie) but the way Magdalena Kozena treats this properly as a song cycle, not an operatic exhibition, and gives warmth and clarity to the floating top notes makes her the ideal singer for this work. She is making it her own and very few have ever captured its spirit or conquered its challenges so effectively, escpecially when partnered by the unmatched musical sensitivity of flautist Clara Andrada and oboeist Kai Frombgen. I am hearing Kozena sing it six times in eight days (including the final rehearsal where I was the only non-performer in the room). There are some things in life for which I really should be truly thankful.
SM