1. November 2023
Maria Gstättner guided musicians and audience through the city park © APA/EVA MANHART
It was a bit chilly, but the open-air start to this year’s edition of Wie Modern certainly left no one indifferent. After all, Maria Gstättner had invited people to the city park on Tuesday evening to listen to her “fanfare” while walking – in keeping with the festival motto “Go”. An undertaking that was just as successful as the opening concert immediately afterwards, for which Peter Jakober redesigned his “Saitenraum”.
First of all, after dark, we had to find our way between the Vienna River, the Kursalon and the Strauss Monument. There was no specific starting point for Gstättner’s project, in which military music met traditional costume band and feminist punk band met artistic lighting design. Rather, you were allowed to look around at all the entrances to the city park and quickly found what you were looking for: here a lonely trumpeter, there a drummer waiting. The protagonists gradually began to make their instruments sound and headed towards an unknown destination.
Like a procession, performers and listeners came together and the interaction of percussion and wind instruments led to constantly changing, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker pulsating sounds, which corresponded entirely to the ritual character of the performance (appropriately for Halloween). As a result, several points were missed, the punk quartet Schapka spiced up this fanfare sequence with socio-political noise at two points and finally there was a big finale celebrated together on the banks of Vienna.
Anyone who longed for some warmth after the fresh air found what they were looking for in the concert hall. Here too, the “movement in space” was followed, as Wien Modern is subtitled this year: spread across the large hall, the Mozart Hall and the Schubert Hall, a total of 60 musicians from the Vienna Symphony Orchestra took their positions to perform Jakober’s “Saitenraum II”. to be presented accordingly. This is a continuation and new writing of his work “Side Space”, which was presented last year – only larger and denser in every respect.
With individual click tracks in your ears, the 26 violins, 10 violas, 14 cellos and 10 double basses performed a microtonal meditation, for which different tempos were used. The resulting shifts, but also the movement through the halls – the audience was explicitly asked to roam freely through the rooms – repeatedly created new possibilities for perception, which either emphasized individual sounds or the overall impression. It was not uncommon to see people closing their eyes in order to let oneself completely immerse themselves in this music.
The great celebration for everyone involved can be seen as a promise for the coming weeks. Because after this very special, but also extraordinarily engaging prelude, this Wednesday in the Konzerthaus you can experience “11,000 Strings” by Georg Friedrich Haas for 50 pianos distributed around the room. Olga Neuwirth can once again expect a kind of flash mob in public spaces, while Kurt Schwertsik will do a “fantastic revue” from “Alice in Wonderland”. A total of 57 productions and 91 concerts including 66 premieres and first performances are scheduled until December 2nd.
2023-11-01 05:08:37
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