Music festival
Schubertiade (Hohenems)
Hearts and flowers
Rodney Milnes
As always, there were more Brits at Hohenems this year than you could shake an alpenstock at, and as always Brits of quite the best sort. Mrs Kenward herself would not feel out of place, nor would those few Spectator readers who seem not to be there already. And as always there was plenty to be there for: the wild flowers (irises and orchids, with fearful penalties advertised for interfering with same), the swarms of butterflies that practically have to be kicked out of your way on gentle Alpine perambulations, the steadily pro- liferating first-class restaurants, and in general the absurdly picturesque, well- scrubbed Vorarlberg landscape, over every undulation of which you expect Julie Andrews to come gambolling, trilling wholesome melodies the while. All that was missing was the red squirrel busily going about her/his/its business last year in the copse by the balcony of a lodging house whose precise location not even a suitcase of used tenners would make me reveal, but the buzzards (I think they are buzzards) were still circling the valley in lazy search of breakfast, causing regular panic amongst the jay population. All this and Schubert too.
As always there was the instructive matter of context. Quite rightly, the major masterpieces are given each year but in amongst them come both works of such contemporaries as Mendelssohn (the octet an especial joy, complementing the dis- tinctly Mendelssohnian feel of the genius loci's G major piano sonata D. 894) and Beethoven (a complete quartet cycle), and much early Schubert himself. At what D-point does garrulousness give way to heavenly length? What is the precise differ- ence between purposeful search and mere ambling? How important is execution? More than one might at first admit. Whis- per it not in Graz, publish it not in the streets of Klagenfurt, but if the octet is not superbly played it can be really rather boring; it wasn't superbly played this year, in one of two concerts by a Russo-Austrian ensemble led by Oleg Kagan and Natalia Gutman, superb musicians both, but so unsmiling, so strangely lacking in love and sympathy that one felt they should be arraigned before some House Un-Austrian Activities Committee; even the Trout would have been joyless without the cheer- ful contribution of the Styrian bass player Alois Posch.
There are still nagging worries about the once sensational Hagen Quartet. They have a new second fiddle whose silky sweet tone duplicates that of the first, Lukas Hagen; their phrasing has become rather mannered, all squeezy hairpins and Palm Court — this must be the only quartet to be led decisively by its cellist, the excellent Clemens Hagen. If their account of the C major quintet could not erase memories of that revelatory performance of three years ago, amends were made with Mozart's E flat quartet K. 428, whose second move- ment, threading its way gingerly through an impenetrable labyrinth, is wholly, troublingly Schubertian.
But the special feature of Hohenems this year was the development of the Peter Schreier–Andras Schiff partnership. Schiff s playing is of a quality to lead to mass immolation amongst ordinary accom- panists: unfair, I know, but he finds things in Schubert's song cycles — hidden melo- dies, unsuspected thematic cross- references — that no one else does. The freshness of his insights has stimulated Schreier to ever greater heights of eloqu- ence (the Fonteyn–Nureyev partnership springs to mind): the tenor has honed his art to new-found subtlety and hyperexpres- sive understatement.
The Schvvanengesang we had a foretaste of last year: now it was even better, with the uncalled-for applause after Relistab's Standchen — simple perfection — readily understandable. The Schone Miillerin was a slight disappointment; Schreier sounded tired, and the web of communal concentra- tion was broken when Schiff accidentally struck the keyboard after `Mein!'. The performance never quite recovered. But their Winterreise was the experience of a lifetime. Both artists eschewed any hint of the conventionally harrowing approach, choosing rather to stand back and watch the traveller's mental disintegration from a safe distance — at times Schiff seemed almost to be mocking him with the cheerful 6/8 accompaniments. The stages in a hu- man being's journey to complete alienation were precisely, almost clinically marked: it was a bit like watching a brain operation, and it took more than one stiff brandy afterwards to regain one's equilibrium.
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