After some intrigue, which I never got to the bottom of, the festival was evicted from the palace and found a new home, or homes: it’s now divided between one modern hall in Hohenems and another in Schwarzenberg, high in the hills ten miles away. Those of us who feel jaded from too much opera and crave chamber music – piano, quartets, above all song – as an antidote are by no means starved at home, what with the Wigmore Hall in London and St George’s Bristol, not to mention the Aldeburgh Festival in June and the Bath Mozart week in November. But none can match the beauty of the Schubertiade’s setting, and I came back to Schwarzenberg in June after several years’ absence in a mood to enjoy myself, though also to see how it, and the current state of art song, were getting on.
To call this long weekend a mixed bag would be one way of putting it: the Schubertiade offered the good, the bad and the ugly, the last in the sense of dubious choice of performers. In economically challenged times there’s a tendency for managements to look for artists either near the end of their careers or at the beginning, those who go by the periphrastic designation “Rising Stars” or “New Generation”. There was something of both on offer in Schwarzenberg. Best of the new was the Minetti Quartet, young Austrians (two of them from Ohlsfdorf, and a prize to any student of contemporary literature who can work out why that gives the quartet its name).
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