With a generous arts budget and one of the world's biggest new concert venues, Vienna is bringing modernity to a great tradition. Michael Dervan reports on a week of music and opera in the city
Vienna is a place of shrines. Or so it seems when you consider the city's wealth of musical associations. You can walk the rooms where Mozart, Beethoven and Johann Strauss lived and worked. You can soak in the atmosphere of halls in which some of the greatest works of the musical canon were first heard in public. And it's not all connected to the 19th-century mainstream with which audiences are so comfortable, or the struggles of Mahler the conductor against the weight of tradition in his work in the opera house. There's a spanking new Arnold Schoenberg Centre, where you can now find that great man's study, transported to Europe from California, with fascinating home-made tools, an early photocopying machine, and images of his Los Angeles garden recreated beyond the imaginary windows.
You could, of course, point out that Schoenberg in Vienna is like Joyce in Dublin, celebrated after his passing rather than during his lifetime. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra brought Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande to the hallowed space of the Musikverein, Vienna's most celebrated concert hall, for this year's Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival), and the audience raised the roof with its cheers, calling conductor Claudio Abbado back on to the platform time after time, long after all the musicians had departed.
But it would be foolish to regard the music of the Second Viennese School as everyday fodder in the composers' home town. Berg's Lulu, I was told by Ioan Holender, director of the Staatsoper, is good for no more than three performances in a season. Put it on an extra night, and it will be difficult to sell out - an important consideration for a house that prides itself on its 93 per cent occupancy rate.
The Staatsoper itself is an institution that everyone you talk to has an idea how to reform. The singers, people say, aren't what they used to be - but are they ever anywhere, any time? The conductors often aren't up to scratch. The players mutter about a surfeit of Italian repertoire and, of course, about the conductors too. The audiences don't like the productions to be too daring.
It's a daunting treadmill of an operation, running a repertory system that sees a different opera performed every night, and a repertoire that can extend to 60 works in a season. Ticket prices can be as high as €178, but a quarter of the 2,276 capacity is given over to standing places, priced at €2 and €3.50. This is an opera house within the reach of everybody's pocket, which is probably why everybody has an opinion about it.
If four straight nights make a representative sampling, some of the grouses would seem to be soundly based. The orchestra is wonderful - the pool of players who work in the pit at night also constitute the membership of the Vienna Philharmonic - but much of the conducting does rather smack of routine.
The honourable exception was Donald Runnicles's gripping treatment of Wagner's Die Walküre, plainly directed and set by Adolf Dresen and Herbert Kapplmüller, and with singing of style and solidity from John Tomlinson as Wotan and Deborah Polaski as Sieglinde.
Elsewhere, the focus was mostly on the singing, Natalie Dessay wooing the audience with her easy coloratura in Bellini's La Sonnambula, Edita Gruberova wonderful and eccentric in equal measure (vocally mesmerising, musically perverse) in Donizetti's Roberto Devereux, and Stefania Bonfadelli a fetching presence in Gounod's Romeo et Juliette.
The most intriguing of the productions was the Gounod, in which director Jürgen Flimm and lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe replaced a conventional physical set with swathes of colour and space through extremely versatile and mobile onstage light-tower grids.
Opera of a different sort was on offer in the Wiener Festwochen's presentation of the world première of Three Tales, a video opera by composer Steve Reich and his partner, video artist Beryl Korot.
The subject-matter has a technophobic ring to it - the destruction of the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg airship, the atomic tests at Bikini Beach, and the cloning of the sheep Dolly. Reich offers these topics as "cautionary tales", though the effect is often that of a moral sermon written out of anger.
The score is nervous, twitchy, constantly seeming to click back into a groove from which it then threatens to escape, the five singers moving automaton-like under the large screen that carries the video. There was some- thing strangely self- aggrandising about the event. The messages were simple, and their delivery had an insistence that fell somewhere between learning by rote and brainwashing. Hey, we can all see the risks involved without being beaten over the head about them for more than an hour.
In the discussion that followed the performance I attended, one eulogistic questioner must have given the composer pause for thought. She referred to the work as "this film", a perfectly reasonable interpretation based on the accompanying role the music seemed to fill.
The performance was given in one of the halls created in Vienna's new MuseumsQuartier, a vast arts centre - among the 10 biggest in the world - created out of a baroque imperial stable.
AMONG major institutions, this €145 million project now houses the Leopold Museum, with its important Egon Schiele collection; MUMOK, the city's museum of modern art; and the headquarters of the Festwochen itself, a celebration of theatre, music and opera spread over May and June, with a music programme that alone runs to some 60 concerts. The controversy that raged over the creation of the MuseumsQuartier was not, it seems, about the expenditure involved, but about the height of the two new museum buildings, which was eventually reduced so that, viewed from outside, the original skyline remains unsullied.
The compromise (with excavations allowing the necessary sub-ground floor levels) was presented to me as a typically conservative Viennese solution. And conservative Viennese tradition, you might expect, could hardly come more hidebound than in the form of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, a bastion of old ways where even the presence of women in the ranks has been fiercely resisted. No one I spoke to in Vienna seemed to be too concerned about the now technically resolved sex discrimination issue, not least, I suspect, because the Vienna Philharmonic is a self- regulating body which carries out its activities without state subsidy - or, at least, with only the state subsidy that enables the men to earn their living in the opera pit so they can otherwise play as they please.
The music programme of the Wiener Festwochen allowed the opportunity of hearing, in the one venue on a single day, the Vienna Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Choral Symphony under Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic playing Mahler and Schoenberg under Claudio Abbado. Rattle, whose Choral Symphony was part of a full Beethoven cycle with the VPO, is shortly to take charge of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Abbado is right at the end of his tenure with that orchestra.
Rattle's Beethoven is strong on dramatic contrasts, and keen in its observation of short motivic exchanges. He gives the impression of having left no stone unturned in this work - no chord uninspected, no dynamic that hasn't been puzzled over, no issue of internal balance that hasn't been carefully weighed and then as carefully weighed again. It was a performance in which the driving force was the abundance of ideas. The orchestra's playing was incisive and sharp, the vibrato lean, the colours clear and distinct. I don't think I've ever heard another performance of the Ninth that seemed to stem so much from thinking and, in its turn, provide so much to think about.
At times the results were mystifying, as in the relegation into the background of long-breathed violin lines in the slow movement. On the other hand, with a fresh-voiced City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus (a few moments of strangely choppy articulation notwithstanding) and a strong team of vocal soloists (Barbara Bonney, Birgit Remmert, Kurt Streit and Thomas Hampson), the finale was carried off with persuasive sweep.
The Berliners, by contrast, were both more svelte and more tonally overpowering. Mahler's Rückert Lieder with Waltraud Meier seemed at times almost too nebulous to register. The orchestra's manner, in which dissolving blends and high-octane projection somehow co-exist, blazed into exciting flame in the Schoenberg, with the violins retaining a miraculous sweetness while holding their place against the fiercest eruptions of the brass in this late-romantic orchestral orgy. As a demonstration of orchestral virtuosity, this was the sort of display that has few peers. But Rattle and the Viennese players seemed to be engaged on a more probing and exploratory journey, earthy rather than urbane, and, ultimately, in a nice Viennese paradox, less tied to musical tradition.
Irish art-lovers might be interested in the levels of public subsidy that support this range and quality of activity. For the record, the federal culture budget, even under pressure from a right-wing government, runs to some €215 million, the separate budget of the City of Vienna (which has its own, socialist, minister of culture) to over €170 million. Ireland and Dublin, eat your hearts out.
