Marvão Summer Music Festival, Part 1

This is the time for summer music festivals, a ubiquitous and often-entertaining tradition that keeps European musicians employed in the off-season. Portugal has several, and last weekend I had the chance to sample the festival at Marvão, a small citadel town near the Spanish border. The festival is set in a scenic old fortress town with only 90-100 regular inhabitants. But the town's population swells due to tourists, especially during the two week July Music Festival, when concerts are held in various baroque churches, and large concerts in an open-air space in the castle, seen at the tip of the hill below. 

I saw four concerts, all very affordable at 25 euros per ticket. Least memorable were the two chamber concerts held in churches. The "Concerto Barocco" by the Portuguese early instruments ensemble Os Musicos do Tejo featured pieces for instrumental ensemble and voices, mostly by Portuguese composers who were contemporaries of JS Bach (early 18th century). It's great to see the Portuguese reviving music by their national composers, but I wish more of the music was really memorable. It mostly has the character of lesser Italian baroque music by Corelli, Albinoni, et al. This is logical, since most or all of these composers studied in Italy, and the Portuguese royal court commonly hired Italian musicians and architects. Overall the concert was well played but a bit monotonous. Like Baroque art in most Portuguese churches, this music provides a pleasant overall background but is rarely of high enough quality to hold up to intense inspection. 

The other chamber concert was by the Sitkovetsky Trio, formed by students from the  Menuhin Conservatory in 2008.  Founders Alexander Sitkovetsky (violin) and Wu Qian (piano) have now been joined by cellist Isang Enders, who plays with big and luscious tone, and has credentials including briefly holding the principal cello position at the renowned Dresden Staatskapelle. Their concert of the Beethoven Trio op 97 (Archduke) and the Mendelssohn Trio op 66 was played in a romantic style, fine in the Mendelssohn but a bit much in the Beethoven. Yes, this is late Beethoven with marvelous inventive writing, especially in the extended first movement and in the scherzo that shuns a typical contrasting B-section trio but instead hops back and forth into a modernistic chromatic counter theme. But stylistically I like  my Beethoven more connected to the classical movement, and less to Brahms, as was done here. The Mendelssohn trio was unfamiliar to me. It's a late piece (1845) in which Mendelssohn reprises multiple aspects of his earlier styles. After the rather dark first movement, the second movement sounds like the melodic Songs without Words, and the short Scherzo sounds like the 17-year old composer, fleet of foot in Midsummer Night's Dream. In the last movement we even get a superimposed hymn, typical of late Mendelssohn's conversion and turn to Christianity in works like Elijah, composed one year later. The trio played with virtuosity and fine musicianship, but there was some intermittent imbalance, as the cellist had a much richer tone than the violinist, a flaw often exposed in slow passages. 

The large concerts in the castle were better. Saturday night's featured the Chamber Orchestra of Cologne (the resident orchestra of the festival) and conducted by Christophe Poppen (who founded the festival 10 years ago). The outdoor setting has its usual challenges (sun in your eyes at the start, occasional insects later), but worked OK. Like much of Portugal, this is not a scene for the orthopedically challenged, as you have to hike up a step, cobblestoned path to get to the concert. There were some electric carts available, but you still had to negotiate slopes after the drop off. The mostly-Portuguese audience of about 600 behaved well, despite some younger attendees trying to video the concert as they would at a rock venue.  The crowd was enthusiastic, and offered the obligatory Portuguese standing ovations after each concert, sometimes even after a piece early in the concert. 

In general, I think concerts here would benefit from an installed orchestral shell, as the sound tended to decay and lack resonance without amplification. 

The opening Beethoven Overture to Coriolanus op. 62 is very dramatic middle-period Beethoven, but the drama was diminished here by the distant acoustics. Ditto the following extended dramatic aria Infelice op. 94 by Mendelssohn. In this late opus piece, soprano Juliana Banse's long, demanding part was a bit swallowed by intermittent wind gusts that prompted attendees to put on jackets and wraps despite the earlier 30C afternoon temperatures. Much better was the ending performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto by German violinist Veronika Eberle. This was played crisply and with marked phrasing and articulation, especially the wonderful dancelike rondo ending that, for once, made me tap my toes because of the strong rhythm, not just virtuosic passagework. This is the way I like to hear Beethoven, with strong contrasts between potent drama and more classical lightness and dance. Both violinist and conductor/orchestra achieved this nicely, and I will look forward to seeing her perform in the future.