Salzburg Festival Opening Concert 2010

The 2010 Opening Concert for the Salzburg Festival consists of:

1. Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4

2. Boulez Notations for Orchestra

3. Bruckner Te Deum

Daniel Barenboim conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and is also the piano soloist for the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4. Soloists in the Te Deum are Dorothea Röschmann (soprano), Elīna Garanča (mezzo), Klaus Florian Vogt (tenor), and René Pape (bass). Directed for TV by Michael Beyer; Video Editor was Gernot Arendt; audio by Alfred Zavrel; produced for home video by Hartmut Bender. See individual sections of mini-review for grades of each number. 

I start my mini-review with comments that apply to all numbers on this program.  PQ is excellent throughout. This was shot in 2010, and it's apparent that folks in the industry have learned well how handle lighting and gear to produce beautiful HD video images. Although this doesn't purport to be an audiophile-level sound recording (96kHz/24 bit sound sampling, etc.), the dts-HD Master Audio provides sound that easily beats typical CD and DVDs. In the past we got quite a few HDVDs of ad hoc concerts performed to celebrate events like the opening or closing of a festival. A lot of these titles are mediocre. But this is a serious program performed by a top orchestra augmented with about as much guest-artist glitter as could possibly be acquired these days. So I had high hopes for this title.

Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4

We already have a recording of Barenboim playing and conducting the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4  at the Klavier-Festival Ruhr on the EuroArts label. But subject performance is even better. Here Barenboim plays with both the utmost in power and finesse, whereas in the Klavier-Festival performance I detect a few minor rough edges. And the (larger) Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra here provides  sound with a tenderness and refinement that surpasses the work of Barenboim's own Staatskapelle.

That's the good news---now we get into the other kind. We have written extensively on this site about the characteristics of a good HDVD of a symphonic work. A good HDVD follows Huang's law: "Use the flexible power of the the high-def camera to get a pleasant (not hyperactive) mixture of shots of the whole orchestra, groups of sections, large sections, small sections, groups of sections and individuals, and solo players---depending on what forces the composer commits at various places in the score." In other words, give the viewer as much visual information as possible (just like being there) and only go in for close-ups when there's a specific reason.

You can't follow Huang's law in a DVD. The low resolution of the DVD camera makes it difficult or impossible to get a decent image of a whole symphonic orchestra. This pretty much forces the DVD director to make a movie by stringing together a long series of close-ups of "easy targets." We call this a "road runner race" in honor of the Road Runner cartoons. If you shoot a good DVD, it will be a bad HDVD. If you shoot a HDVD, it will not look good in DVD. The two products are mutually exclusive.

My heart leapt up when I saw the first image of the Weiner Philharmoniker on this disc: a beautiful, interesting whole-orchestra shot as the band warmed up. I could easily see all the sections and the PQ was excellent. Next came a side shot that showed Barenboim coming on the stage head on. This was exciting because this is the only way I know to get the conductor on stage without having motion artifacts from a panning camera. So the first two images from the show by Michael Beyer both follow our principles for a good HDVD! What a wonderful way to start! Soon the concerto performance began, and I expected to see a magnificent whole-orchestra shot right away. But no, I started seeing close-ups, and my heart began to sink as I realized the truth: Beyer was going to take this opportunity to make a gorgeous, memorable HDVD, pull the handle, and flush it down the DVD drain! 

And flush he did: there is not one 100% whole-orchestra view in this concerto. (There are several conductor shots from the side showing most or all of the players, but these don't count because we see the backs of half the musicians---another deadly sin against HDVD.) So what does Beyer give us? Well, the usual DVD fare: Barenboim's excellent performance is chopped up into 136 fast cuts, which is too many to be enjoyable in HDVD. In addition, there are 19 inane shots of Barenboim as conductor peering up over the piano looking at the orchestra what we can't see. Mixed in with this are 110 shots of tiny fragments of the orchestra. This includes 17 instrument-only shots, the dumbest of all stunts used to try to make a movie with DVD cameras that in fact can't correctly see the thing they been assigned to photograph.

So why did Beyer do this? The fault lies with the bosses. They told Beyer to make a DVD, which he did. Then the bosses tried to harvest more from the shoot by selling it also in Blu-ray dress. The bosses are correct when they say the Blu-ray has a sharper picture than the DVD. But what they don't know or don't care about is that the best DVD ever made will be a lousy HDVD.  Well, I'm obviously speculating about things I can't know for sure. But one thing I do know for sure: I'll not spent money on disc in a Blu-ray package if that disc is really is a DVD. With HDVD we can do so much more. Grade: C  

Boulez  Notations for Orchestra 

Listening to the Boulez Notations for Orchestra is like putting on an inner tube and going over a waterfall---I survived and it was exciting. I guess I should say that Notations is modern music heading off in experimental directions.   Barenboim uses a score (the only time I've seen him not work from memory) that looks like it might be the schematic plans for a factory complex. I counted about 117 musicians on the stage including a doubled percussion section.  It's a challenge to take all this in; but that's OK, because it's short.

Unfortunately, the video content for the 22-minute Notations is almost pure DVD. Faced with huge forces onstage and a chaotic score,  the TV folks all but gave up on showing us anything other than the conductor, solos, small fragments of sections, and (26!) instrument-only shots. There are 4 brief part-orchestra shots with 90% of the players, but 2 of these were made while the orchestra was at rest between movements. There is only one 100% whole-orchestra view (49:21), which serves to prove that Beyer could have made a decent HDVD out of this had the stars been so aligned. Changing the subject, I got the impression that SQ for Notations was not as good as for the Beethoven Piano Concento No. 4. Notations was recorded in a different room and it possible there were not enough mikes to go around. Grade: C

Bruckner Te Deum

Finally, we have what will probably be the only HDVD for a while of the Bruckner Te Deum. This is a bracing,  refreshing that is also short.  The four solo singers are a dream team, all of whom have done fine work on other HDVDs. In this Te Deum, the tenor takes the lead. You might wonder if Vogt, whose voice is sincere, sweet, and refined, would be overshadowed by the other glorious forces on stage. Well, he probably could not project his voice with the penetrating power of either of the ladies next to him. But he manages to be heard well enough and to blend in well with the quartet. (For some reason, I get the best result listening to Vogt by using the surround sound track playing into my earphones.) The PQ remains great, and I think SQ in this segment is also very nice.

Unfortunately the Te Deum is troubled with the same DVD characteristics we have already complained of in this mini-review with too many shots of the conductor, backs of musicians, instruments only, etc. But there are whole-orchestra shots at the beginning and the end plus 2 during the performance. Then there are 9 part-orchestra shots. I liked the 33 views of members of the choir, all exceptionally beautiful even if too  many of them showed only a few singers. And all 22 shots of the soloists are impressive both for sonic and physical beauty. So even though this starts off as a DVD in disguise, the exceptionally good aspects we note allow this number to claw its way up a notch.  Grade: B

Update on Sunday, January 1, 2012 at 4:40PM by Henry McFadyen Jr.

I felt in August last year a bit lonely when I gave this odd program such a high grade. Well, I've since received support from Matthew Gurewitsch writing in the Opera New (January 2012 at page 65) about the Salzburg Festival Opening Concert 2010. Gurewitch, who is vastly better qualified than I to discuss singers, agrees with my (too tentative) assessment of the singing of Klaus Florian Vogt in the Bruchner Te Deum. Gurewitch states, "... Vogt dispaches the tenor's long, exposed paragraphs with lyric timbre and heroic thrust, to thriling effect." Gurewitch also liked the Notations performance which he described as "on fire from first to last." Well, I guess being on fire or swimming over a waterfall would be equally exciting ways to describe Notations.