Dudamel brings Mahler's 'Resurrection' to Salzburg as symbol of optimism in time of tragedy
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Set us as preferred Salzburg, Austria — “Optimism doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine,” the Belarusian flutist and political activist Maria Kalesnikava said in this year’s Salzburg Festival keynote address.“It means deciding to step up and act, even in the face of uncertainty.”Picture-perfect, Mozart-drunk Salzburg can’t pretend everything is fine.
Temperatures are rising and normally rainy Salzburg now worries about water shortage and the environmental ravage of over-tourism.The artistically and culturally exceptional six-week Salzburg Festival, which began mid-July with a two-week Ouverture Spirituelle this year titled “miserere” (mercy), is facing its own political and administrative turmoil and uncertainty.Salzburg’s worries are our worries; its triumphs can be ours as well.
Los Angeles and the Salzburg Festival have been cultural and political soulmates for close to a century, beginning when playwright, director and filmmaker Max Reinhardt, who co-founded the Salzburg Festival in 1920, found mercy in L.A.as refuge from the Nazis.Reinhardt’s star-studded 1934 music-theater production of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Hollywood Bowl offered a template for spectacle in the young amphitheater, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s participation crucially reinforced a young orchestra’s early venturesome ambition following an avant-garde Bowl season the previous summer that nearly bankrupted the Bowl.
Over the next decade this Salzburger’s influence on Hollywood dramaturgy would become legend.L.A.has reciprocated by sending our visionaries to Salzburg, where director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, for instance, have been given the license and means to inspire a reinvention of musical and theatrical thinking.
L.A.arts patrons Betty Freeman and Richard Colburn provid...