There is progress in friendliness in Salzburg, at least externally.

Even at the Whitsun Festival, the tone of the announcements for the Corona measures in the hall was as harsh as that of a morning exercise trainer in the cultural revolutionary re-education camp.

After her “Enjoy the performance!” You couldn't help but be obedient and joyful with tight buttocks.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the features section.

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Now the festival management has spoken the announcements, which is extremely positive: Helga Rabl-Stadler in German, Markus Hinterhäuser in English.

"We also ask you not to change the seat assigned to you" - that sounds like a basis for negotiation.

After all, what point should it have to insist strictly on compliance with the seat allocation, if one allows breaks in performances with public movements, which make any infection chain tracking impossible?

Like Beethoven, Wagner and Sibelius

However, the reality is different. When a man in the Kollegienkirche at the Morton Feldman concert of the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna cannot accept the seat assigned to him because it is too narrow for him and he gets pain when sitting, he offers to sit behind the audience To provide pillars. Friendly women in the hall try to find a solution until their supervisor simply throws the guest out of the church. The fact that “man is a helper to man”, as it is called in Bertolt Brecht's “To those born afterwards” at the end of Luigi Nono's “Intolleranza 1960”, has not yet penetrated him. Corona has changed manners and levels of empathy. An ugly prelude to a thrilling concert.

The Minguet Quartet plays together with the Feldman orchestra “String Quartet and Orchestra”.

Roland Kluttig, one of the few conductors in the world who is just as adept at performing the latest music as Beethoven, Wagner and Sibelius, uses it to develop a delicately mixed study in silver-gray with a flannel texture, over which Matthias Diener, the quartet's cellist, draws silky, shiny octave flags.

An outlet for pain

“Neither”, on the other hand, Feldman's unconventional contribution to the genre of the opera based on a text by Samuel Beckett, becomes a description of anxiety. Oscillating alternating notes in the orchestra to the rigidly wailing repetitions of the solo soprano pictorially record the “back and forth, enticed and rejected” of the text - not as flirtation, but as irritation increased to psychological terror. Feldman's color combinations of humming cellos and high solo flute could come straight from Hector Berlioz's “Grande messe des morts”. Sarah Aristidou sings as expressively as she breaks out into wide melisms, as if her singing were a direct outlet for pain. She increases her creative power to the climax: tearing off her voice before falling silent. Where the sublime was once considered what intimidate and destroy people,can be grasped through art, however, Aristidou suspends the sublimity through art as an indication of the surrender of the singers to greater things - to that which is beyond comprehension through art.

As directly touching as this confrontation with Feldman is, the attempt to update Luigi Nono's scenic action “Intolleranza 1960” in the Felsenreitschule becomes dreary.

Ingo Metzmacher at the podium of the Vienna Philharmonic, together with the Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor, admirably rehearsed by Huw Rhys James, goes to great lengths to evoke the startling power that Nono's music might have had sixty years ago.

Of course, the harsh brass chords with percussion are signatures of ruthlessness, to which the fine web of strings oppose the delicacy and vulnerability of utopian forms of the human.

But what the director Jan Lauwers and the choreographer Paul Blackman do with Nono's original sinks into ridiculousness.

Far from intellectual brilliance

The story of a guest worker who experienced exclusion, torture, renewed flight and the downfall in a natural disaster could have provided the template for an intelligent update. Instead, one sees a tiring fidget and wimmel choreography made up of actionist poses of fleeing and torture. What Brecht demanded of Enlightenment theater, namely to show "the processes behind the processes", is completely omitted here. Lauwers falls far behind the state of art and knowledge. Michael Glawogger's film “Workingman's Death” gave us a much more shocking explanation of the global human trafficking.

And whoever wants to learn something about exploitation in our own country, about totalitarian methods of employee optimization that border on torture, about "potency analysis" and "talent assessment" in human resource management, about building corporate loyalty down to the inwardness of employees and the Functionalization of sensitivity, watch Carmen Losmann's film “Work Hard - Play Hard”. Lauwers is far from this analytical precision or the intellectual brilliance of Frédéric Beigbeder in his novel “99 Francs”.

You can admire the tenor Sean Panikkar as a powerful and tender refugee, Sarah Maria Sun as an earthy, warm and selfishly evil companion and Anna Maria Chiuri as a woman whose singing becomes the appearance of a better world. The staging itself is lazy, actionist left kitsch. The criticism of capitalism at the Salzburg Festival is presented to us with the kind support of Audi, Siemens, Kühne Foundation, BWT and Rolex. Sporty luxury limousines from the main sponsor in bright red, the former color of the labor movement, are waiting after the performance, lined up very nicely in Hofstallgasse.