Ghent Festival of Flanders 2021

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On September 26th, the Festival of Flanders in Ghent concluded its 46th edition with a concert in the impressive Ghent Sint Peter's Church, whose wide beeches were filled with an attentive and enthusiastic audience of all ages. The audience clearly enjoyed this whirlwind closing concert curated by Anneleen Lenaerts, the Flemish harpist of the Vienna Philharmonic. Whirlwind because it aligned with the festival's main theme, which had chosen Vienna and the waltz. That was certainly fitting after a year that hadn't been particularly cheerful, according to Veerle Simoens, director of Ghent Festival of Flanders, who put it this way: "ultimately, the three-quarter time of the waltz has only one heavy and two light beats, and lightness always wins out over melancholy! Isn't the saying 'the situation is hopeless but not serious' typically Viennese?"^st If Anneleen Lenaerts closed the festival, it was her colleagues who opened it. After an absence of just over forty years, the Vienna Philharmonic performed again in the Sint-Baafs Cathedral. In this unique concert venue too, there was hardly an empty seat to listen to performances of Bruckner's fourth symphony and Schubert's eighth, the unfinished. Under the baton of the elderly but still remarkably alert Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt, the renowned Vienna orchestra let its warm, unique sound blossom beneath the high vaults to create its own "cathedral of sound" and launch the festival in grand fashion. And when an elated audience streams out of the cathedral under the festive pealing of the cathedral bells, you know the celebration has begun again.

20210906 GHENT 64 GhentFestival: Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Herbert Blomstedt in Sint Baafs Cathedral PHOTO BAS BOGAERTS

For three weeks there was almost daily a concert that connected in some way, sometimes surprisingly, with the theme "Take this waltz" and of course there was another edition of "Ode Gand" providing "musical enchantment on and along the water." There was a choice between more than ten different routes through the city, each with three concerts of different genres. In the evenings, I was happy to sail again, as the year before, along the magical waterways to experience unique encounters between different musical worlds in an enchanting atmosphere. But at that very moment, Opera Ballet Flanders opened the new season at the Ghent Opera with "Der Silbersee," the rarely performed opera by Kurt Weill. So... a difficult choice!

Back to Vienna and the Ghent opera house that hosted "Het Collectief" in its beautiful Lully hall for the Festival. This is a five-member chamber music ensemble inspired by the "Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen" founded by Arnold Schoenberg in 1918. Schoenberg wanted to give a select audience a taste of new, contemporary music, shielded from hostile press. Because the Verein didn't have a large orchestra, works for these private concerts were adapted for smaller ensembles. This is also necessary for "Het Collectief," a chamber music ensemble founded in Brussels in 1998, consisting of Wilbert Aerts (violin), Julien Hervé (clarinet), Thomas Dieltjens (piano), Toon Fret (flute), and Martijn Vink (cello), and primarily focuses on the roots of modernism: the Second Viennese School but also performs twentieth-century and new music. On their Ghent program, not quite as planned, Debussy's "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune" in an arrangement by Tim Mullema, Schoenberg's "Kammersymphonie opus 1," in an arrangement by Anton Webern, and "Verklärte Nacht" by Schoenberg in an arrangement by Eduard Steuermann. The gentlemen performed with dedication for a limited audience that responded enthusiastically and received an encore.

My next concert visit to the Ghent Festival took me to the Bijloke where the celebrated Dutch violinist Janine Jansen together with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta delighted the audience with Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings" and Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"—well-known, popular compositions that sounded good in the renovated concert hall and made the audience happy. For me, the spark didn't really fly. But that was probably more about me than the performances.

The start of the opera season at the Munt with the creation of "The Time of Our Singing," the new opera by Kris Defoort, deserved special attention. But I was present in the Ghent opera hall for the song recital of British tenor Ian Bostridge, accompanied at the piano by Julius Drake.

On the program was Schubert's "Die Winterreise," a song cycle that Bostridge has performed live and recorded many times and analyzed in writings. I must honestly confess that I'm not so fond of his tenor voice, especially in this repertoire. The tone is too uniform and the voice lacks brilliance. But on the other hand, there's his excellent text projection, his interpretation, and exemplary voice control. And so Bostridge can still captivate his audience, as the well-filled opera hall proved.

One tenor is not like another, and that became clear in the following concerts featuring tenor Rolando Villazon as the main attraction. Actually, he was primarily there in his role as "Intendant Mozartwoche," director of the annual Mozart Festival in Salzburg in January, which is now also going "on tour." But the Festival of Flanders was especially talking about "the internationally renowned tenor." And not much is left of that, as his two rather painful singing performances showed. The "star" of the first evening was the violin that apparently was played by Mozart himself back then. This time that honor fell to Hugues Borsarello, a French violinist who, together with another Frenchman, pianist Paul Montag, performed Mozart violin sonatas with flair and let "the violin" share in the applause! In between, Rolando Villazon (announced as a natural storyteller!) read several Mozart letters and sang one short (unknown to me) aria. The second evening featured musicians from the Camerata Salzburg on stage. They were conducted by the French oboe virtuoso François Leleux, who was a skillful conductor for an orchestra that didn't really need his leadership but shone especially as a virtuoso oboist in Mozart's oboe concerto in C, KV 314. In between, Rolando Villazon sang with rough and inflexible voice two short arias, including one from "Il re pastore," but not "Il mio tesoro intanto," the "phenomenal" aria of Don Ottavio from "Don Giovanni" announced in the program, the coloraturas of which he certainly can no longer manage.

Photo via Ghent Festival

With a theme like "Take this waltz," the festival certainly shouldn't forget dance and asked Hungarian dancer Gabor Kapin, ballet master at Opera Ballet Flanders, to design a choreography. On waltzes by several composers such as Kreisler, Strauss, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Saint-Saëns, Kapin explored the more dangerous, darker side of the waltz. In his ballet "Après le bal," he sketches what the not always pleasant experiences of a young woman at a debutante ball and afterward can be. So it says in the program notes. On the bare, dark, uninspiring stage of the Capitole, this was difficult to discern, so you mainly looked at the graceful, virtuosic evolutions and expressive moments of three male and four female dancers, mostly members of Ballet Flanders with the exception of Nina Tonoli, the Ghent dancer who recently traded the ballet of the Vienna Opera for the National Ballet Netherlands. For musical accompaniment, from their place somewhere to the side of the stage, Maximilian Lohse (violin) and Alexander Declercq (piano) provided the support.

And so the 46th edition of Festival of Flanders Ghent slowly danced toward its end. But first there was still the performance of Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde" by the Camerata Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The thirteen musicians of this ensemble brought "Mahler's final journey in chamber format" in Arnold Schoenberg's arrangement. Rolf Verbeek conducted and the vocal parts were entrusted to mezzo-soprano Barbara Kozelj and tenor Marcel Reijans. It was a moving, intimate interpretation by two singers and thirteen instrumentalists who together evoked the world that inspired Mahler and touched us. I particularly enjoyed Barbara Kozelj's warm, velvety mezzo-soprano voice. A pity she didn't project the text more clearly.

There was no melancholy at the festive closing concert in Ghent's Sint-Pieterskerk where Anneleen Lenaerts played her golden harp and performed virtuosic arrangements of popular melodies, Viennese and others. I greatly enjoyed the arrangement of melodies from Puccini's "La Bohème," according to the program notes an original arrangement by Anneleen. Assisted by the young ladies of the Seleni string quartet, she closed the concert with other well-known pieces such as Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier waltz, and the audience kept on applauding.^st It was a festive finale to a successful festival that offered much more than I could attend and describe here, such as the "Tribute to Leonard Cohen" with composer-conductor Dirk Brossé or the discovery of the intimate city festival "Whispering Leaves" in hidden gardens and parks.