If you walk down the street from Kronberg's old town at dusk to the Casals Forum of Kronberg Academy, you can see the concert hall below shimmering like a diamond.

Although the roof is not quite finished yet, which will enhance the impression of the jewel in gold tones, especially in the sunlight, the transparency of the glass fronts alone has an unconscious effect on the visitors: that they, the people, are put in the right light as the most valuable thing there , can be seen.

That was one of the strongest new impressions at the opening concerts of the Forum at the start of the ten-day Kronberg Festival in the hall previously visited by many of the guests of honour.

The spectators sitting in the stalls and around the stage on galleries also see each other well and ideally feel the common concentration when listening to music,

Guido Holze

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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After the concerts, one thing could be said with certainty about the brightly paneled hall, which literally grounds the hall below street level: in it, music can unfold its gravity, its attraction, its meaning.

Even if there was no chamber music at the opening, it didn't take much to imagine that the acoustics would primarily benefit her.

The spatial sound tends towards intimacy, is conducive to quiet, present and selective.

It comes closer to the baroque ideal of split sound than to the romantic melting sound.

Subtleties crisply accentuated

This was immediately evident in Bach's Concerto for Two Violins and Strings in D minor, BWV 1043, in which the Academy soloists Irène Duval and Seiji Okamoto let their voices sing over the bass, which was powerfully prominent in the acoustics, warm in tone, as in a love duet .

The Chamber Orchestra of Europe was also a sensitive song accompanist for viola soloist Antoine Tamestit in his Dowland transcriptions and Britten's "Lachrymae" Op. 48a.

And András Schiff, who previously sat quietly at the timpani and listened to the acoustics and orchestra, as conductor in Haydn's Symphony No. 104 in D major, showed how many subtleties can be worked out in the hall with crisp accents, and even more so in the following program with Bartók's strings - Divertimento, how the softest tones, muted and pale things come into effect.

In Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35, which the soloist Vadim Gluzman performed without a conductor as a pure virtuoso concerto in all brilliance, the most noticeable lack of melting sound and volume was missing.

The hope expressed by Gluzman that Kronberg could now become a “Mecca for art” carried all visitors home.