 
Heinrich Spängler
Helga Rabl-Stadler
Entführung
Masterpiece
Don Carlo
The concerts
Salzburg Passages |
THE SALZBURG PASSAGES
A NEW FEATURE IN THE FESTIVAL PROGRAMME
The “Salzburg Passages” will take place for the first time in 2003 as part of the Salzburg Festival and aim to venture into new territory. They will create a link between various arts and sensuous forms of experience: between music and colour or light (Alexander Skryabin), between music and fragrance (Karlheinz Stockhausen), between music and action (Jani Christou). The series will focus attention on outsiders in 20th century music history – composers such as John Cage, Franco Evangelisti, Morton Feldman, Conlon Nancarrow, Giacinto Scelsi or Galina Ustwolskaya – and create an arc from yesterday to today, showing where there are correlations and linking contemporary with traditional works.
Rudolf Hradil, Seventh
Avenue, New York, 1978
A new festival within a festival
The Salzburg Passages will begin in August 2003 as a “Festival
within a Festival”. The name can be interpreted in many ways and
has many associations as does the programme it describes.
On the one hand one might think longingly of voyages by ship on a blue
ocean, travelling to distant, mysterious coasts. On the other hand, Salzburgers
and their guests might first recall the charming arcades leading from
the Getreidegasse which invite those at leisure to linger, especially
on days when it’s pouring with rain.
Pianists are also well acquainted with the concept of a passage: as a
“hobby-horse of concert players”, as the German scholar Heinrich
Christoph Koch wrote two hundred years ago in his Musical Encyclopaedia.
And this is what it is all about, about embarking on a journey, making
a crossing and a discovery, strolling around, having time to observe and
contemplate, and of course about virtuosity – as a discipline of
fantasy.
Crossover artists
Crossover artists will have decisive influence on the “Salzburg
Passages”, the eccentrics, visionaries, harbingers and prophets,
the Promethean artists. And as the romantic idea of the religiosity of
music and its original unity with painting and literature unmistakably
forms the basis of the programme, the first evening will be devoted exclusively
to Alexander Skryabin. The Russian composer under the spell of esoteric
doctrines planned a seven-day ritual, a mysterium that was to be celebrated
in a temple in India erected especially for that purpose. There the initiated
were to be raised to the level of a “cosmic consciousness”:
a liturgical synthesis of the arts and consecration festivity consisting
of music, dance, gesture, words, fragrances and colours. However, Skryabin
only managed to leave behind the sketches for a “preparatory action”
for humanity in need of redemption. They can be heard in a freely arranged
version by Aleksandr Nyemtin on 21 August in the Felsenreitschule, and,
not only that, they can be experienced. Other works by Skryabin that can
be heard are his Prométhée for orchestra and Tastiera per
luce, the piano of colours, that only nowdays in the age of multimedia
and laser technology can fully unfold its magic.
Rudolf Hradil, Bridge
in Manhattan
Art in all its glory
Karlheinz Stockhausen intends to stimulate the senses as far as the supernatural. On 29 August, one week after his 75th birthday, the grand maître of avant-garde will present the world premiere of his work Düfte – Zeichen (Fragrances – Symbols), commissioned by the Salzburg Festival. In 1839 Franz Liszt reported from Italy, “Art in all its glory appeared to my astonished eye and revealed itself in its entire universality, it its whole unity. Every day through feeling and thinking I became increasingly aware of the hidden relationship between all works of the creative spirit.” In a special piano recital on 26 August 2003 compositions by Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann, advocates of breaking down barriers in art, will be on a programme alongside pieces by Giacinto Scelsi, Charles Ives and Karlheinz Stockhausen, exemplifying passages through change and how history can return. The other concerts concentrate on the œuvre of persistent outsiders and unwavering loners such as Galina Ustwolskaja from St. Petersburg, who expressed the outmoded confession that it depended on God and not on herself whether or not she composed. Or Jani Christou, born in Egypt, who includes ritualised actions with the character of a happening in his music; or the American Conlon Nancarrow, who led a secluded life in Mexico city and for decades hardly wrote anything other than studies for the automatic piano.
The shortest and the longest piece of music
How time passes – on the final evening of the “Salzburg Passages” and of the Festival itself this thought may well pass through the minds of concert visitors. For the finale of the “Festival within a Festival” Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet will be combined with Anton Webern’s Bagatellen op. 9. Feldman’s composition takes about five hours to perform; Webern’s extremely short and fleeting pieces are over after only about four minutes. At the end will listeners feel raised to “cosmic consciousness”? They will certainly find their musical perception changed, intensified, refined and enriched.
Wolfgang Stähr
Salzburg Passages
Thursday 21 August 4.00 p.m.
Felsenreitschule
Opening
Conductor Gerd Albrecht
Piano Aleksei Ljubimov
Chorus Master Rupert Huber
Works by Alexander Skryabin
Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus
Danish National Orchestra
Friday 22 August 8.00 p.m.
republic
Blue Cliffs
Conductor Emilio Pomárico
Works by George Lopez · Vadim Karassikov and Bernhard Lang
Klangforum Wien
Saturday 23 August 8.00 p.m.
republic
Austrian Night
efzg live + polwechsel live and a world premiere by Gerhard E. Winkler
Österreichisches Ensemble für Musik
Conductor Peter Hirsch
Sound director Peter Böhm
Boris Hauf · dieb 13 · Martin Siewert
Burkhard Stangl · Billy Roisz ·
Werner Dafeldecker · Radu Malfatti · Michael Moser
Wednesday 27 August 8 p.m.
republic
Homage
Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik (oenm)
Conductor Johannes Kalitzke
Guitars Jürgen Ruck · Elena Casoli
Cimbalom Jan Kokyta
Works by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf
Thursday 28 August 8.00 p.m.
republic
Time I space
Conductor Jonathan Nott
Ensemble Modern
Works by Conlon Nancarrow and Pierre Boulez
Friday 29 August 7.00 p.m.
Perner Island, Hallein
Fragrances
Piano Maurizo Pollini
Conductor and sound director Karlheinz Stockhausen
Stockhausen Ensemble
Works by Karlheinz Stockhausen
Saturday 30 August 8.00 p.m.
Kongresshaus
Ritual – Praxis – Metapraxis
Mezzo-soprano Anne-Carolyn Schlüter
Directed from the piano by Rupert Huber
Voice artist N.N.
Wiener Jeunesse Orchester
Works by Jani Christou
Sunday 31 August 6.00 p.m.
Mozarteum, Wiener Saal
Passage Finale
Auryn Quartett
Works by Morton Feldman and Anton Webern
Tickets are available from the Ticket Office
of the Salzburg Festival.
Telephone: 0043 662 8045-500
Telefax: 0043 662 8045-555
E-mail: info@salzburgfestival.at