How to make a virtue of a cliché
Identity
If you’re an arts journalist like me, you’ll know that the word “identity” is likely to provoke a cynical snigger. It’s one of those baggy, catch-all terms like “belief ” or “vision” beloved of artistic directors who should really be concentrating on getting the best out of their talent (are you listening, Jude Kelly?). So, well done to the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland’s equivalent of the Proms) for taking such a nebulous term and using it appropriately and to such worthwhile ends.
Identity is the theme of the season, but a special day was here dedicated to it, with a series of concerts both inside and outside Lucerne’s sleek Culture and Congress Centre which looked at “otherness” – my baggy, catch-all term, not theirs – and featured artists from all over the world.
It began with Sila by John Luther Adams, a composer clearly besotted by landscape, and the piece was used to fill the outside space that looks on to the tranquil Reuss river and the mountains beyond. If you weren’t paying full attention, watching the Orchestra of the Lucerne Festival Academy tackle this mystical work was a bit like attending one of those Sixties happenings with everyone smelling of patchouli or damp coats. But if you wandered along the walkway, past each section of the orchestra, you could see they had been arranged in a harmonic scale, the sound shifting depending on where you stood.
The highlight of the day took place in neither of the centre’s two grand halls but in a small space with terrible acoustics. Luckily Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the Moldovan violinist, rose above the technical challenges with gusto, performing a trio of works which demonstrated both her ability to master fiendishly tricky musical expressions and her determination to attack everything with folk-like passion.
Kopatchinskaja was enormous fun – whether duelling with the crashing crescendos of Polina Leschenko, her pianist, or staging a complex journey towards resolution with Jay Campbell (a young American cellist whose prodigious ability to create an intense emotional atmosphere with one sustained note meant that he nearly stole the show).
The most disappointing aspect of the day was also the most eagerly anticipated. Mozart’s opera Idomeneo had been reconstituted by director Bernd Schmitt to include a refugee choir (“Zuflucht”) who disrupted the libretto at certain intervals to tell their own stories of displacement. Things started promisingly thanks to Birgit Angele’s smart set design – a huge, lopsided wooden table which also represented a sinking ship, with a stretched white canvas (the sail) above.
Giving Idomeneo a modern makeover is not a terrible idea: its themes of war, flight and submission are as relevant now as they were in 1781. So where did things go wrong? I couldn’t help but feel that there was a touch of misjudged liberalism about this project. It seemed tasteless to make a cast of real refugees feign drowning as if they had capsized in the Mediterranean, and the artistic decision to have Manolito Mario Franz (in the title role) jettison many of the shades of opera seria in favour of a broader, at times comic, interpretation jarred further. Added to this a rather feeble attempt at multimedia presentation (you know things are desperate when an onstage character starts using a video camera) and an incohesive picture emerged.
Luckily, Lucerne’s Identity Day boasted enough enchanting performances and exquisite musicianship to let this bumbling and inept Idomeneo fade into the background. Here, in fact, was proof that sometimes it’s better to forget the high-minded concepts and just let the music play.