styriarte 2007 - Alles fließt (Everything flows)

"Fuor del mar, ho un mar in seno": Having been saved from the turmoil of the sea, Idomeneus, King of Crete, can find no peace – the storm wrestles on within his soul. The drama of man, who is completely at the mercy of fickle fate, has often been depicted in the metaphor of the stormy sea and nobody has better expressed this metaphor musically than Mozart in his great opera "Idomeneo". This marvellous piece, written by the 24-year-old Mozart, directed and staged by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, stands at the centre of the styriarte 2008. The Graz maestro reverts back to the original Munich version of the piece and deploys a sensational young line-up of singers with Albanian tenor Saimir Pirgu in the title role. The immense power of the Arnold Schoenberg Choir braves Neptune's storms while the original sound of Concentus Musicus Vienna will be pushed to its limits with Mozart's most revolutionary score. But it's not only around Crete, the island punished by Neptune, that the sea rages. In Hamburg Harbour also, ancient deities rampage in the ebb and flow of the tide. We see the canal city of Venice storm-lashed. Handel's opera heroes are pursued by mountainous waves – like Commissario Brunetti in Donna Leon's novels. The styriarte 2008 leafs through the musical "seascapes" of the baroque era and paints a fresco of an unleashed elemental force. The Roman "Mare Nostrum", the sea in which Crete lies, brings a third narrative chord to the festival. Jordi Savall relates the story of the Sephardic Jews who were driven apart and spread to every coast of the Mediterranean, in the same way that the Greeks, making their way home from Troy, were scattered to the four winds by the wrath of the gods. In a second programme he follows the path of the Spanish Armada up to England’s coast. We hear of the victory of an English naval hero in Egypt and of the myth of the fountain of youth in the Mediterranean world. In this country, where rivers and lakes, fountains and springs are merely a source of drinking water, things are somewhat less mythological. But these sources of water have beneficial effects on the body and the soul, as composers have often experienced: Bach in Karlovy Vary, Brahms at Lake Thun and Schubert in Bad Gastein. For the romanticists, in particular, streams and lakes were symbols of good fortune in life and the destiny of man. For Franz Schubert, everything flows: the whims of the trout in "Die Forelle" and the fair maid of the mill in "Die Schöne Müllerin", the most "heavenly lengths" of his later chamber music. "Not Bach (stream), but Sea should be his name". Several chapters in the styriarte programme have been dedicated to the great composer whose name brings water to mind. There are also several performances in the programme which pursue the myths of the sea in cinema. For the closing week of the styriarte, the interior of the Helmut-List-Halle is transformed into a ship – the S.M.S. styriarte. "Everything flows" – in our lives as in the styriarte 2008. styriarte. The film styriarte. Die Signation Komposition: Christian F. Schiller (Infos unter Künstler) (0:05 Min, 0.1 MB) [ more ]

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