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).
The festival repertory is far from confined to its namesake. Along with inconsequential early Schubert, they played Mozart: the “Hunt” Quartet and the Clarinet Quintet with Martin Fröst, and played them beautifully. If one had to award marks, the Minetti pipped the Apollon Musagete Quartet, who gave the Death and the Maiden quartet, by a number of points.
And the Minetti could also have given lessons in restraint to Christian Zacharias, now a veteran pianist (and sometimes conductor). He played snippets from Brahms, Mozart and Haydn before the wonderful Schubert Six moments musicaux. At his best very good, he needs to learn from contemporaries such as András Schiff and Imogen Cooper that, whatever else Schubert playing may be, it should never be mannered.
But the point of a Schubertiade must be songs. Let’s get over the bad news. Andreas Schmidt has been a fine baritone in his time and at 62 is ten years younger than Placido Domingo, who is still very much at it. When Schmidt began the first bars of Winterreise, it seemed that the bloom of his voice had gone, but it soon became clear that he had lost more than the bloom. Bearing in mind Philip Larkin’s lines about when it “becomes still more difficult to find/Words at once true and kind,/Or not untrue and not unkind,” the less said about this recital, the better.
Of the three other song recitals I heard, Christoph Prégardien’s long evening of ballads had the merit of originality: how often does one get the opportunity to hear Schubert’s “Der Zwerg” and “Die Bürgschaft”, let alone pieces by Wilhelm Killmayer, Franz Lachner or Carl Loewe? It would be idle to fault the singer for histrionics, since few of these count as great music and there’s anyway a flavour of Victorian ham about their texts, not to say the settings.
We also heard a work by Michael Gees, Prégardien’s accompanist, but the problem wasn’t so much his composing as his playing. Gees is someone else who needs to take advice, in his case from the late Gerald Moore, the famous accompanist, who called his memoirs Am I Too Loud? After Gees had pounded and battered the poor Steinway into submission, one was relieved that it seemed none the worse for wear when next played.
Two other accompanists showed how it should be done. The tenor Werner Güra gave an evening of Schubert songs, all of them familiar, none of them ever staled by repetition. He displayed more of the right stuff, albeit with his own superfluous dramatics, and he was well matched by Christoph Berner at the keyboard. But that was surpassed a few hours earlier. Carolina Ullrich is a most appealing young Chilean soprano, who gave another score of Schubert songs, some of them less-well known work from his teens, though well worth hearing and prettily sung. She was if anything outshone by Marcelo Amaral, her splendid Brazilian accompanist (and yes, it does seem unlikely that South America should be a hotbed of Austro-German art song, though why not?), whose playing was of the first excellence.
If there was much to enjoy in Schwarzenberg, and some hope for the future, there was also cause for concern. Maybe it becomes wearisome to talk about the wisdom of the ancients but younger singers really should listen to how it was once done, let’s say by Gerhard Hüsch or Hans Hotter: each song given with force and delicacy combined, the words sung with close attention to their meaning but without each syllable pounced on and tormented, an absolute emphasis on legato musical line. And don’t worry about the drama: Schubert did that for you.
The next part of Schubertiade runs from 27 August to 8 September in Schwarzenberg
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