The mobile construction was completed on schedule within four weeks and therefore only finished shortly before the opening concert: significantly faster and - financed half by the “Neustart Kultur” funding program - at a cost of one million euros, significantly cheaper than the 789 million euros Hamburg Elbphilharmonie , joked Michael Herrmann at the welcome with justified pride.

The audience in the Fürst von Metternich concert cube at Schloss Johannisberg shared the joy of the 77-year-old founding director of the Rheingau Music Festival and applauded just as warmly for the construction manager Matthias Becker, who has accompanied the festival as an event technician since it was founded in 1987, now with his company BST.

The music-loving engineer played a key role in initiating the project.

Guido Holze

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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    When Gabriela Montero hammered the first chords of the five sarcasms op.17 by Prokofiev into the keys, it quickly became clear that the acoustics in the hall, which is permitted under Corona conditions in the double checkerboard pattern for around 520 listeners, is as excellent as predicted. The Venezuelan pianist seemed to enjoy the full sound of it herself and, in Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 2 in D minor, Op. 14, brought the rabid motor traits with a lot of rhythmic energy and the lyrical parts with melancholy into a harmonious relationship. If you closed your eyes, you could really “bathe in the sound”, as Becker had promised. In cooperation with experts from the renowned Munich acoustic office BBM, it has been calculated exactly how the sound is best over the broken walls,the acoustic sails are scattered on the ceiling and the wooden floor.

    A cube on the move

    The demanding, for the pianist exhausting program exclusively with music by Russian composers from the first third of the 20th century, continued with the shorter Sonata in F sharp minor by Igor Stravinsky composed in 1903, similar in motor rhythm, but also playful neo-baroque with trills and alienated ornaments.

    That this was a reduction and a stylistic change at the time became completely clear in comparison with Rachmaninoff's mighty Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 36: For this late romantic virtuoso music, which with its tendency towards overloading typically shows an epoch in the final phase , Montero very appropriately developed a powerful sound in the style of the old Russian pianist school, almost with elemental force.

    The final part was eagerly awaited, which Montero, as she likes to do, created with improvisations on topics at the request of the audience. The beginning melody of the Loreley song "I don't know what should it mean" was sung to her by Montero in a great way and with a lot of empathy, in the spirit of German Romanticism, for example in the style of Schumann and Brahms.

    She performed “Somewhere over the Rainbow” partly polyphonically in the Bach style, partly waltz-like and jazzy in the manner of a habanera. Her improvisation on “The moon has risen” turned out to be Schumannesque at first, but contrary to the character of the melody, it was impulsive and virtuoso. For the concert cube, in which strings also sound very good, this was a prelude that made the spontaneous power of live music tangible in the most direct way. The cube is to be dismantled after the end of this year's festival in September and will soon go on tour. There are even inquiries from other organizers who want to rent the cube, according to Herrmann.