July 31, 2022
The 28th DonauFESTWOCHEN in the Strudengau was opened on Friday in ideal evening weather at the Greinburg with a large number of participants from politics, business and art. The indispensable festival with its specific character, founded by artistic director Michi Gaigg, will pamper the art-loving audience with early music and contrapuntal surprises until August 18th. The festival stage is decorated with many rarities.
Under the title “Viva l’Italia”, Antonio Vivaldi and Italian baroque masters born north of the Alps were the focus of the opening act. It is amazing what the special ensemble Main-Baroque-Orchestra Frankfurt, which was invited for the interpretation and led by Martin Jopp, with flutist Christian Prader, discovered in “German” baroque works by old masters from the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
As if the strings were dancing in the sky of sound
You had to be a specialist to know the music of a Brescianello, Ferrandini or Galuppi “Il Buranello”. One never tired of wondering and admiring how the strings masterfully reproduced the spirit of presentation of old music. Their dynamics, created in a virtuoso manner with floating tones, were particularly striking, how they unaffectedly set accents and cultivated their dialogue, as if the strings danced by themselves in the sound sky.
The celebratory speech was given by the writer Anna Baar, who was only recently awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize, and whose stylistically finely polished presentation was a pleasure to follow. In terms of content, however, her visionary message of overcoming and proving your worth in times of crisis only brought the usual metaphor of the interrelationship between art and politics, a topic with which she also created tension in the audience from the perspective of personally experienced events.
Von Georgina Szeless