Gstaad Menuhin Festival takes up in style

After two editions tainted by the COVVI-19, the festival created by Yehudi MENUHIN, in 1957, in Switzerland, returned to success and the public. The concerts are available on the event platform.

by

Green as if it was raining, an explosion of meadows and forests, wooden chalets punctuated by apple, olive, fir or celadon -colored flaps: if there is only one place on the planet where Global warming does not yet skip the eyes, it is in the magnificent Saanenland, who saw the Grand Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) lay his violin box and found, in 1957, the summer festival that always bears his name. Like everywhere, COVVID has done its work. “In order not to disappear in 2020, we maintained a very tight edition in digital version, then taken up in 2021, with a reduced 50 % gauge,” explains Christoph Müller, director of the demonstration since 2002. That is to say if the Seven weeks of festival reconquered this season symbolize hope.

Entitled “Vienne: Beethoven Delayed”, in tribute to the German composer, whose 2020 edition could not honor the 250 e anniversary of the birth, this 66 edition, devoted to Vienna (after Paris in 2019), imagined the mugged pandemic. But the seventh wave was right for the monumental Missa Solemnis, planned at the opening. Too many positive musicians at Sars-Cov-2 among the choristers of the Rias Kammerchor in Berlin and the instrumentalists of the Freiburger Barockorchester. Reduction of workforce and new Beethovenian exile. It is the rare Missa in Tempore Belli, of Haydn, followed by Requiem, of Mozart, who finally resonated, on July 15, in the beautiful Church of Saanen, under the direction of the Baroque chief René Jacobs.

Aura Philanthrope

A magnificent concert, with a power of evocation all the more moving than the “mass for a wartime”, also baptized “Paukenmesse” because of the timpals which punctuate its warrior impulses, was written by Haydn In 1796, when General Bonaparte’s first Italian campaign raised the invasion of Vienna to the Austrian troops. The beauty of each choral desk, of unparalleled homogeneity and precision, the excellence of the orchestra on period instruments, the incandescent sobriety of the maestro, who directs seated, but triggers with a lodging Patriotes and deep meditation, all this galvanizes and seizes to the point of breathtaking. Like these organ points pushed to the paroxysm of the apoplectic rupture.

You have 66.9% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.