From 26 April, crossing your fingers, perhaps live music will be heard again: the institutions – under adequate health conditions – should reopen to the public. However, there are places where the doors of theaters and concert halls have never been closed in recent months. For example in Montecarlo (and in Spain). Right, wrong, right, local phenomenon, time will judge. Certainly a strategy is now mandatory – thinking about the future, not just the immediate one – and maybe the maps of those who have dared to go against the current will be able to serve as a useful road map.
“Spring Arts Festival”
For five weekends, the “Festival du Printemps des Arts” punctuated in different places, and with beautiful medallion programs, various places in the Principality of Monaco. To draw them Marc Monnet, in the last of nineteen years – a record! – at the helm of a review that is always pleasant, affable, welcoming. Typical of his seasons to mix languages and surprise. Via the plastered frames, for example in the two consecutive harpsichord recitals, at the Oceanographic Museum. First with Olivier Baumont, elegant miniaturist, not an out of place note in the roundup of Chambonnières, Couperin (both, Louis and François) and Rameau, the rigorous, and Balbastre, disciple of his brother and already in the smell of fortepiano.
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Then, all outside (room cleaned up like the fish tanks nearby) and after the exactness came the furious and rattling inspiration of Pierre Hantaï: a double sound compared to his colleague, more foul, but more creative. With lots of explanations between Händel and Bach (Suite in G minor, Gustav Leonhardt version), some pull of the strings and the final gallop of the Chaconne, a true apotheosis.
Franz Liszt
From the harpsichord we flew to a portrait Franz Liszt, author who has almost disappeared from the symphonic layouts, of which the Monte Carlo Philharmonic performed four pieces, starting from the descriptive “Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe” (“From the cradle to the grave”) and concluding with the shrill “Festklänge”, delightfully rustic, written at the intellectual court of Weimar, but with the thought of the dances of the Hungarian peasants. At the center of the concert the piano, with the full-bodied “Grande Fantasia”, not easy for certain passages of Berlioz’s “Lélio”, required of the instruments in unison, followed by the bombastic “Totentanz”, of great effect, with the theme of ” Dies Irae “.
Ivo Kahánek
Soloist with austere hands, well spatulated on the keyboard, Ivo Kahánek, Czechoslovakian. He was supervised by the young conductor Gergely Madaras, a good sound obtained naturally – as the Hungarians often do – softer than biting, on a full-fledged and always quality orchestra. Sold out and applause to no end, in particular in the final party in Monnet, from next year replaced by Bruno Mantovani, French composer.