Styriarte in Stainz

Jordi Savall: spiritual life, vivid feeling

Jordi Savall with soloists, festival orchestra and Schönberg Choir in Stainz.

(Bild: Styriarte/CT)

Jordi Savall is an annual highlight of the Styriarte program. In Stainz at the weekend, the 82-year-old maestro conducted Mozart's Mass in C minor. There will be a reunion with him at the finale of the festival on June 20 and 21.

It remained a fragment during Mozart's lifetime - but even as such it is almost perfect. The Mass in C minor K. 427, composed in 1783, combines the splendor of Baroque church music with the lyrical sensuality so typical of Mozart.

A combination that 82-year-old early music specialist Jordi Savall knows how to express in his conducting at the Styriarte in the Stainz parish church. If you close your eyelids during the "Kyrie", you can literally see in your mind's eye the spatial staggering that the festival orchestra imprints on the opening under Savall's experienced direction. The clever work with tonal depths, full of dynamically balanced entries by the beautiful Schönberg choir, bristles with sacred persuasiveness. Even if later, for example in the "Credo", it recedes somewhat in favor of controlled opulence.

Bravura soloists
Miriam Kutrowatz's flowery soprano works as a lively, sensitive counterweight to the spiritual. While the mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland, who is particularly effective in the higher registers, functions more as a partner than a contrast to Kutrowatz, she forms the energy center of the soloist quartet, lending the religious music a personal character note with her vital, distinctly charming operatic voice. The male voices of Daniel Johannsen (tenor) and Manuel Winckhler (bass) have little room for bravura in comparison due to their limited stage time, but they have their parts well under control with agile entries.