Salzburg; Birmingham
Fourteen months ago, scandal nearly destroyed the Salzburg Easter festival. This annual event, founded by Herbert von Karajan in 1967, is a compact, private version of the more extended and glitzy summer festival, held amid the baroque splendour of Mozart's home city. Alleged fraud, an attempted suicide and ongoing criminal investigations gave unwanted colour to an enterprise in which the atmosphere is familial ? the Karajan family are still closely involved ? artistic standards paramount, a shared passion for music the lifeblood.
For those who follow the European festival scene, this is not news: sackings, an iron-fisted restructuring and the swift appointment of a new managing director or "intendant" rescued the event from catastrophe just weeks before last year's opening night. And never mind art, think of the shopkeepers. The festival attracts an estimated ?18m to the city at a time when tourism is quiet and massed sing-along Sound of Music bus tours ? it was filmed on location here ? are not yet out in force.
"I was the poor sucker on hand who was parachuted in to do the job. The words 'scrape' and 'barrel' spring to mind," joked Peter Alward in Salzburg last week. The British former EMI executive is now at the helm. Despite his modesty, Alward's credentials are impeccable. By birth "an Austro-German-Welsh mongrel" with a part-time base in Salzburg, he has long attended the festival as a paying guest. Now he's boss, he still buys his own tickets, on principle ? especially in the light of recent alleged malpractices by his predecessors. In addition, he understands central European mores and can deliver a courtly, heel-clicking hand-kiss as if born to it.
All this will provide excellent support for Sir Simon Rattle, whose recording career Alward nurtured for 20 years at EMI's London HQ. In the merry-go-round of life Rattle, as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, is artistic director of the Salzburg Easter. Karajan installed the Berliners as resident orchestra in 1967 and they have been coming each year since. From a British viewpoint, it's an eye-popping enterprise. We have nothing comparable. More than half its budget of ?5.5m ? for a 10-day festival! ? comes from the box office.
Top ticket prices are a cool ?510 ? roughly double Glyndebourne's ? with an additional ?300 patron's loyalty fee per person. They are expensive, yes, but available to anyone, if you take out a mortgage and put your name down early enough. You may wish to: next year Magdalena Ko?en� (Rattle's partner) sings her first Carmen, opposite the world's leading tenor, Jonas Kaufmann, with British choreographer Aletta Collins directing.
One of Alward's initiatives has been to introduce a complementary chamber music series (tickets ?30). On Easter Monday, in the gold, ivory and ochre splendour of the Mozarteum, members of the Berlin Phil and its academy ? young players in waiting ? gave an absorbing account of Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings. Strauss's sombre late work, completed in April 1945, was a response to wartime bombing of opera houses in Vienna, Berlin, Munich and Dresden. Much painful collective memory is contained within this complex elegy, in which the violas lead the lament. This audience could scarcely have been more engrossed. Rattle showed his own commitment by conducting from memory: surely not easy in this convolutedly patterned score.
A controversial new staging of Salome ? which was premiered in Dresden in 1905 ? was the highlight of this year's festival, given two performances conducted by Rattle and with the Berlin Phil in the pit. You may think the story, as told in the Bible and elaborated into a play by Wilde on which Strauss based his opera, simple if nasty: girl falls for prophet, dances for salivating stepfather and demands love object's head on a platter.
The Norwegian director Stefan Herheim has raided the ideas cupboard and come up with enough to furnish the entire operatic canon. One massive phallic telescope, a moon and a canopy of stars dominated the stage. Herod's court was peopled with tyrants and underdogs of history: a pope and Galileo, Nazis, ayatollahs, imams, patriarchs, Napoleon, a fey Caligula, coal scuttle-helmeted Prussians, an archduke type and a tsar.
Into all this tripped six cloned Barbie doll Salomes in glitter frocks to assist the charming virgin herself with that most awkward of operatic interludes, the Dance of the Seven Veils. Awkward, that is, since few who can sing Salome can also dance or vice versa and in certain unfortunate cases, when put to the test, can do neither.
Emily Magee, in the title role, was not obviously born to play this shimmying, neurotic, adolescent necrophiliac. In normal life that would be a compliment. Struggling with low notes and dressed in unbecoming white prom frock and long blond wig, she appeared more overgrown Alice than neophyte sex kitten. Hanna Schwarz's Herodias, who alone could be heard fully, and her page (Rinat Shaham) appeared as witchy twins, as did the tux-wearing Narraboth (Pavol Breslik) and Jochanaan, sung by Glasgow-born Iain Paterson. In a more acoustically forgiving theatre all would have improved, but only the orchestra, conducted by Rattle with coruscating clarity and no cheap histrionics, really shone.
At least there was no danger of missing directorial signposts. John the Baptist's head, when it finally arrived and which in pre-latex days was often a grapefruit or melon adorned with a wig, was monstrously outsized, eyes like craters of the moon, nostrils flared as cavernously as the entry-exit lanes of the Blackwall Tunnel. Instead of cradling the head for her final, sordid ecstasy, this Salome has to climb right into his mouth, seriously risking lockjaw, except that he is dead.
Rattle has likened Salome to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in its impact on the European avant garde. Last week, in Birmingham and London, this was the work his old band, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, performed, danced by Julia Mach to 3D film by Klaus Obermaier. As a one-off, this approach beguiled. Ilan Volkov conducted with tight-reined perception, and the orchestra was on visceral form. Rattle would have been proud. Salzburg and Birmingham may be closer on the cultural map than we think.
Magdalena Wróbel Connie Nielsen Melissa George Cameron Richardson Chandra West
