Humbling brilliance amid the antlers
Michael White on the Moritzburg Festival and Gergiev's Sleeping Beauty
29 August 2008

Schloss Moritzburg is an impenetrably moated pile near Dresden that, for all its baroque beauty, was a hunting lodge. Designed for death not culture, every room is choked in the Teutonic way with antlers, boar's heads, epic canvases of animal and human savagery. Like Bluebeard's castle, it drips blood.

But modern Germans like the world to know this sort of business is behind them. And to make the point, Schloss Moritzburg now houses one of Europe's leading chamber-music festivals, founded 16 years ago by the cellist Jan Vogler (who must have been young at the time: he isn't that old now) and still very much his show.

Living these days in America where he has a higher profile than here in Britain, Vogler runs his festival along the lines of Marlboro in Vermont, where an elite corps of young players work alongside a still more elite corps of experienced ones to form a summer academy.

It's much the same at Moritzburg. And given the correspondence it's not surprising that most of the musicians there seem to be American: Vogler's friends and contacts from back home. As a result, it becomes a place for Europeans to check out the latest US talent. And checking it out last weekend was a humbling experience.

One after another fresh-faced unknown in his or her 20s came out and dazzled with a technical brilliance that would astonish even in London, which we all like to think the world centre of musical education. And as the mentors included stars like trumpeter Alison Balsom, pianist Boris Giltburg, and Vogler himself, it was playing of the highest standard, start to finish.

In the schloss I heard oddities like Rossini's bizarre concert-duo for cello and double bass (yes, there is such a thing) done with disarming virtuosity by Vogler and the principal bass-player from the Metropolitan Opera, Timothy Cobb. And in nearby Dresden - part of the festival's outreach - I heard a diffuse but radiant chamber version of Strauss's Metamorphosen, swimming in the bathtub acoustic of the newly rebuilt Frauenkirche.

For contrast, that concert was followed by late-night Piazzolla tangos at Dresden's all-glass, totally transparent Volkswagen Factory. And to hear what that sounded like, there's a just-out Sony CD featuring Vogler and his Moritzburg colleagues Piazzolla-ing as though their lives were at stake. It won't give you the surrounding atmosphere but it will the notes, the style, and the incredible assurance of these musicians. And it certainly flags Vogler as a name to follow.

Next year he takes control of the big Dresden Festspiele which used to be East Germany's answer to Edinburgh and Salzburg but then got sidelined by Unification. Expect a new lease of life in that quarter.

A less cheerful expectation these days is that any classical ballet score done with classical ballet attached will be lousy. It may be the same orchestra that played a stunning Traviata the night before under Great Maestro X; but come ballet night, the music sags under a workaday conductor and a vague sense that it doesn't matter because the audience is there to watch rather than listen.

So let joy be unconfined that last week Valery Gergiev (pictured below) conducted the LSO in a Proms performance of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty with not a dancer in sight! And what's more, it was the whole score, every note, including all the numbers that get cut because the dancers, bless their legs, get tired.

In truth it made a long night, but so what? And though the LSO doesn't quite deliver the upholstered sound of Gergiev's other band at the Kirov, it has learned enough from its new music director to be a fair substitute - with less soul than you'd get from the Russians, but more accuracy.

My only complaint is that the audience behaved so badly, with considerably more movement, mobile phones and clinking glasses than is usual. I guess that's balletomanes for you. Take away those tutus and they don't know what to do.