The musicians of the Festival Strings Lucerne chamber orchestra interweave a lively, dynamic network of energy flows not only centrally with their director and concertmaster Daniel Dodds, but also with each other.
They gave the traditional "Mozart Night" of the Rheingau Music Festival in the Eberbach Monastery with an opening and a closing concert in the cloister their framework and their listeners the feeling that all the pieces played were newly created in the moment.
First they introduced the remarkable Joseph Martin Kraus (1756–1792): born in the same year as Mozart, raised in the Odenwald and traveled no less widely, Kraus found the focus of his life in Stockholm, where he died just a year and ten days after Mozart.
The overture to the tragedy "Olympie" by Johan Henrik Kellgren (1751-1795), composed by Kraus in the year of his death, was played in the still sunny play of colors of slate roof shine, radiant white-red walls and weeping willow-blue-green.
Like Voltaire before him, the Swedish Enlightenment poet was presumably concerned with the widow and daughter of Alexander the Great, who had been expelled after his assassination.
A quiet start
The music begins dramatically, at least in this wonderful interpretation, to repeat the beginning in the quietest way, as if questioning.
From the following gripping, noticeably thoroughly thought-out and energetically extremely harmonious playing, a dialogue between bassoon and horn stood out, from stage edge to stage edge, across the strings, like a communication between mother and daughter, who meet and recognize each other again by chance.
Finally, like mother and daughter reunited at the stake, the music died away over the sizzling, pizzicato-dappled pedal of the low strings.
Mozart's dry, sparkling Bassoon Concerto in B flat major K. 191 was characterized by wonderful communication between the soloist Sophie Dervaux and the orchestra.
As an encore, Sophie Dervaux chose an arrangement of Mozart's "Greatest Hits", the motet "Ave verum corpus" for bassoon and string orchestra.
As an encore, Sophie Dervaux chose an arrangement of Mozart's "Greatest Hits", the motet "Ave verum corpus" for bassoon and string orchestra.
The audience hummed along confidently.
For the second part of the evening you had to choose between three parallel programs of promising young musicians.
The longing for the Aris Quartet alone spoke against the Ensemble Prisma in the Basilica and violinist Timothy Chooi with pianist Martin James Bartlett in the Hospitalkeller.
In the lay dormitory, the four young people who were once thrown together as a quartet at the Frankfurt Music Academy played Mozart's "Dissonance Quartet" KV465 in the lay dormitory in a way that is simply joyful.
There doesn't seem to be any automatism between them.
Everything is thought through to the finest detail and still appears spontaneous.
In the following clarinet quintet KV 5981, clarinettist Thorsten Johanns liked the buttery tone.
But spoiled by the rich detail work of the strings one would have wished for a few more shades from him.
After the Festival Strings Lucerne had literally given everything in the first part, they seemed exhausted in the final third part and yet sincerely tried to maintain their high level.
Watching this effort touched almost more than Mozart's Divertimento for strings in B flat major KV 137 and the conclusion with timpani and trumpets in Symphony No. 34 in C major KV 338. The next day, due to the high demand for this event format, they had to be exact play the same thing again.