John Eliot Gardiner / Avaliações

In Salzburg, the actor Jens Harzer proves to be the ideal cast for the torn, nervous, exalted title character who struggles for spiritual redemption and at the same time cannot accept it. The fact that the texts of the other characters are largely abbreviated or that Harzer adopts them in a dialogue with himself does not necessarily make the story arc easier to understand. Under the comparatively good financial festival conditions, Gardiner could have had more courage here to really complete the work by involving additional actors. In the end, the English conductor is primarily concerned with the music, whose inherent theatrical power he makes audible from the perspective of historically informed performance practice. The fact that the strings of the Camerata Salzburg play almost continuously without vibrato on both evenings ensures a fine-nerved, yet energetically charged sound. Gardiner brought the Monteverdi Choir, which he founded, with him, after which, fortunately, entire ensembles from Great Britain are now allowed to re-enter.The - consistently outstanding - soloists emerge from the Monteverdi Choir instead of joining them from outside. This corresponds to the spirit of the choir culture of the 19th century, in which the citizen rediscovered himself as a singing collective. In his choir cantata "The First Walpurgis Night", Felix Mendelssohn describes how the last remaining pagans in the time of Charlemagne outwitted the Christians in order to be able to celebrate the old, now forbidden Germanic gods. The fact that Christianity appears here as a religion of oppression is what makes the piquancy of the text - also by Goethe -: the heathen disguise themselves as witches and devils in order to frighten the superstitious Christians, which could also be easily implemented in a scenic way. Gardiner puts a lot of effort into creating an exciting arc that definitely stimulates the theatrical imagination. In the dry pointed forte he whips up the sounds with which the Monteverdi Choir and the Camerata Salzburg kindle a true witches' Sabbath. With their relational combination of rare works, both evenings fulfill the claim that the festival should have: a place of the special, to become impossible in the average concert business.