Elina Garanca - Live From Salzburg

The forced pause in live culture caused by the corona was painful for artists and listeners alike, and neither online broadcasts nor digital offerings were able to cover up how much the direct contact between performer and audience was missing. All the more captivating since the beginning of the pandemic were those concert events that could actually take place. The album Live from Salzburg, to be released by Deutsche Grammophon on December 3, documents two of these extraordinary performances, performed by mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča at the Salzburg Festival in the summers of 2020 and 2021 with the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Christian Thielemann. These are concerts that made history - because they defied the worldwide crisis of live culture, but above all because of their outstanding intensity. In addition to purely orchestral works, the program on the evenings in the Festspielhaus included orchestral songs that are now on the Deutsche Grammophon album. On the one hand, the Wesendonck Lieder by Richard Wagner can be heard, whose intimate expressiveness and poetry stand for themselves. The composer worked out his illicit feelings for Mathilde Wesendonck in this melancholy and emotional song cycle, and composed the pieces devotionally performed by Garanča on the basis of poems by his beloved. Wagner's "Five Poems for Female Voice and Piano" could be experienced in Salzburg as an orchestral version, arranged by Felix Mottl. The Wesendonck Lieder are followed on the album by Gustav Mahler's Rückert Lieder, which he composed not as a cycle but at various times as independent individual works. They are characterized by the fine lyricism of Rückert's texts, which Mahler interpreted musically as intimate character pieces and turned into suggestively effective atmospheric pictures Both times, the concerts were staged under exceptional organizational conditions. In the summer of 2020, it was open for a long time whether the festival would be able to take place at all; in the end, the festival dared to opt for the live performance with an audience, albeit under enormous security precautions and with a significantly reduced audience. Admission only with a personalized ticket, mandatory masks and a seating plan in a checkerboard pattern were the outward signs of this extreme situation in the first Corona summer. A year later, the pandemic still ruled the world, and cultural activities in normal mode were not possible. So the mask remained a prerequisite for attending the concert, 3G controls were added, but the hall could be fully occupied again. The atmosphere in the hall was correspondingly expectant and present, as the live recordings impressively prove. The artists themselves proved their brilliance and greatness all the more in the special setting: Elīna Garanča, for whom song is the "most intimate form of musical expression ever," interpreted the two multi-part compositions with uncompromising dedication and highly concentrated emotionality. As if the music were under a burning glass, the singer exposed the core of the texts and captivated with perfect articulation and vocal elegance. The Vienna Philharmonic, on the other hand, convinced as a symphonic body with chamber-musical sensibility and penetrated the score sometimes delicately shimmering sometimes thrillingly dynamic. Christian Thielemann, with whom Garanča has worked on several occasions, acted as an emphatic shaper at the conductor's podium, mastering the grand gesture as well as the filigree detail work. He impressively maintained the balance between soloist and orchestra.

Price: $18.98

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