Last year the Salzburg Whitsun Festival was canceled, but the edition of the festival in summer became an internationally recognized test run, as in the pandemic art can be possible in front of a large number of spectators. Everything went well, but nobody in (German) politics wanted to hear echoes of this success. But this year the Whitsun Festival could take place, on four days a total of 5,767 visitors came, the total occupancy was 99.5 percent of the officially permitted occupancy of 50 percent of the hall capacity.
Will we learn from it this year, if everything will hopefully have gone well? At no time do you feel unsafe in the large festival hall, with around 1150 others. You sit in a strict checkerboard pattern, access to the house is like visiting a high-security wing. What you will soon forget. Even the fact that you wear this mask that kills every perception. Because perfect musical happiness makes you forget everything else.
Puccini’s “Tosca” becomes a bewitching experience in this concert performance. The 85-year-old Zubin Mehta leads the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, of which he was chief conductor for 32 years. This symbiotic relationship between the musicians leads to an overwhelming sound miracle full of colors, power and poetry. At the end, Mehta is embraced by the soloists in gratitude, the audience standing for a quarter of an hour of applause – it is a resurrection of music.
And of course it is a festival of singers and one great singer, Anna Netrebko. Radiantly beautiful in a black velvet dress with a pink flutter collar (in the third act she then wears a silver dawn) she goes into clinch with her Mario at the beginning, alternating between warm love and jealousy. But just as she wishes him to paint black the eyes of the woman whose picture he creates in the church, there is an infinity in it. And Netrebko’s “Vissi d’arte”, the singer’s commitment to art and love, has it all. A delicate simplicity, a rebellion, radiance, always surrounded by deep sadness. Netrebko’s Tosca is clever, she knows a lot about life and its dangers. She is never naive. Even if she doesn’t sing, if she doesn’t spread the elegance of her pianissimo and the grandeur of her voice, if she just speaks, a world arises. In the one sentence at the end of the second act, in the commentary on Scarpia’s death, that the whole of Rome trembled before it, she tells decades of history.
Your Cavaradossi is Jonas Kaufmann. The lockdown is well received in his voice, the hoarseness is gone, he regains a freedom that was almost lost, the timbre seems brighter, he has strength without having to force it, his “Victoria” over the victory of Napoleon has fervor and power of “Wälse” calls. The performance is superbly cast right up to the sacristan (Adolfo Corrado), Luca Salsi is a very profound, if not particularly cunning Scarpia, everyone tries to play in front of the orchestra, close to the audience. And Cecilia Bartoli, director of the Whitsun Festival, pays her reference to the production and appears at the beginning of the third act barefoot and in leather pants, lending the shepherd boy her voice.
In the summer Anna Netrebko will return to Salzburg as Tosca, in the scenic production that was originally planned for Easter. Without Jonas Kaufmann. He then has to sing Tristan in Munich.
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