Concert review

“Zeitklang im Museum”: avant-garde was yesterday

The musicians of the "Wiener Concert-Verein" were convincing all along the line.(Bild: Wiener Concert-Verein)

The second edition of "Zeitklang im Museum" was a resounding success with the audience in Bregenz on Friday evening. The ending, however, was not very exciting. 

The "Wiener Concert-Verein", a chamber orchestra closely associated with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, has now been in existence for 35 years and used to perform as part of the Bregenz Festival. The friendly ensemble now works together with the "vorarlberg museum", where it presents contemporary music from Austria and always from Vorarlberg every summer.

The "Zeitklang" on Friday evening began in the atrium of the museum with the work "Januskopf" by Michael Amann. The acoustics of the room suited this composition for harp (Leonor Maia) and two violins (Hyewon Lim and Anastasija Maximov) very well, as you could hear delicate, seemingly improvised sounds that were given plenty of time to unfold.

"Comeback" of tonality and sensuality
The concert, which had begun so cautiously, was now moved to the hall on the second floor, where the audience heard Wolfram Wagner's "The Four Temperaments", a concerto for marimba (soloist Thomas Schindl) and strings. Under the overall direction of Martin Kerschbaum, the music was played with commitment, so that the phlegmatic, the choleric, the melancholic and finally the sanguine were well characterized.

The "Zeitklang" began in the atrium of the "vorarlberg museum" with the work "Januskopf" by Michael Amann.(Bild: Wiener Concert-Verein)

Wolfram Wagner comes from Vienna and Upper Austria, and the life of Axel Seidelmann, born in 1954, moves within a similar geographical radius. From his rich oeuvre, "Eine kleine Streichmusik" has been selected, which he wrote for a youth orchestra. It was intended to whet the appetite for music and be playable for music students - and Seidelmann not only fulfilled these premises, but it also turned out to be very listenable music for the audience. Incidentally, it was noticeable throughout the evening that composers are once again daring to write in a sensual, tonal and appealing way. So the "avant-garde" was yesterday.

In the end, it tingled - at least a little
A lot of fuss was made about the last work of the evening before and after the concert. It was called "The Adventures of Mrs. Mayer" and was a concerto for two speakers, viola and strings, composed by Friedrich Philipp Pesendorfer, alias Flip Philipp. The text was written by Isabella Stepanek, who also spoke and played the viola part. It was amusing at first to hear Mrs. Mayer and her husband Ernst reveal their needs to each other on a dating platform due to increasing sexual boredom, but in the end the whole thing turned out to be less exciting. Above all, the music and the lyrics had little to do with each other.

The audience applauded wildly ("sex sells") - and shortly afterwards, the symphony musicians in the audience and on the podium hurried into the Festspielhaus for the See performance of "Der Freischütz".