Family zone

The sheet music is fastened with clothespins. Bircher muesli, croissants and Swiss cheese variations await concertgoers on the buffet table. "Landpartie - the family brunch by the lake" is the name of the second Davos Festival concert. The event at Schwarzsee is a premiere. Once again, artistic director Reto Bieri has discovered a new concert venue that sets familiar music in an unfamiliar setting. A Sunday outing in casual clothes with music, good company and delicious food - a combination that works perfectly on this morning in bright sunshine. The open-air concert is no mere attempt to make classical music more palatable for today's concertgoers, as the wind serenades were actually composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for outdoor performance. When the eight young wind players and a double bass player play the Serenade in E flat major KV 375 and you listen to it sitting on beer benches, then music enters everyday life in a natural way. The Davos Festival Chamber Choir under the direction of Andreas Felber not only enchants with perfectly intoned Schubert movements, but also sings the folk songs together with the audience Girls, if you want to go dancing and Il Cucu. The alpine sounds of the Viennese band Alma are also a perfect match for this secluded spot by the lake. Here, kitsch-free yodeling meets crisp, strongly rhythmic violin playing. Accordion and double bass provide color and grounding.

"Family zone" is the name of this year's motto. Bieri discovered it in the SBB train carriages. The creative festival organizer is not interested in theoretical dramaturgical concepts. His ideas come from everyday life and lead back to it. "I'm like a spider and try to develop a web of relationships. Here in Davos, 80 young artists from all over the world come together. They are embarking on this musical adventure. I want something to stick with them and the visitors," says Bieri. That's why he has once again composed 25 concert programs for his third festival edition, with catchy titles such as "Habemus Papam", "Stammbäumchen" or "Muttersprache". Free concerts in the coffee house and train station, an open stage, a listening tour in nature for children and the Young Reporters workshop complete the program. The family zone deals with family relationships between composers and keys. It is about childhood and home. At the beginning of the concert "Nussdorferstrasse 54", the artistic director himself paints Franz Schubert's birthplace on an overhead projector. With the excavation of Joseph Weigl's The Swiss family (1809), which Schubert loved, can even be experienced as a chamber opera in Davos.

The opening concert in the sober hall of the Hotel Schweizerhof takes us into the family zone of Clara and Robert Schumann. The excerpts from the marriage diary, sensitively performed by Julian Lehr, in which Clara wishes Robert would allow her to compose, correspond with the inner movements of the Piano Quintet in E flat major op. 44, composed at the same time. Together with pianist Benedek Horváth, the Quatuor Ardeo places it somewhere between happiness and despair. The evening opened with a virtuoso performance by Thierry de Mey's Table Musicwhich Eléna Beder, Carlota Cáceres and Frank Dupree drum and stroke on the table with their bare hands. The 24-year-old German is actually invited to the festival as a pianist, but for this demanding work he was also asked by the artistic director to play his second instrument, percussion. "Everything is completely different here in Davos. You perform with completely different line-ups. There is a lot of rehearsing. Experimental pieces also find their place here. In addition to percussion, I've also played the grand piano, the piano, an electric piano and a toy piano," says Dupree and presents himself as an uncomplicated, versatile musician who is familiar with Franz Liszt's Weeping, lamenting, worrying, fretting as much as with John Cage's Suite for Toy Piano (1948), which he plays while sitting on a yoga stool. He is one of the many highly talented musicians who can be heard in Davos. Mi-sa Yang from the French Quatuor Ardeo touches the Davos Laret church with a mature interpretation of Bach's second partita for solo violin in D minor. The Cologne-based Asasello Quartet, which, like the other string quartets, also rehearses smaller works with the festival orchestra and conducts from the podium, presents a tonally balanced interpretation of Mozart's D minor Quartet K. 421 in the "Kinderzimmer" concert.  

The festival budget was increased again, to 750,000 francs, because a singing week was added for the first time in February. Half of the budget is provided by companies or sponsoring foundations. Only just under 15 percent are subsidies. Not everything is equally successful at the start of the festival. In their nostalgia and unbroken tonality, the pieces by Valentin Silvestrov, this year's composer in residence, seem like a delicate stylistic copy of Franz Schubert or Frédéric Chopin. The small-scale programs, interspersed with breaks, sometimes only whet the appetite, which is then not fully satisfied. But Reto Bieri has planned for this desire for more. The audience should be stimulated, but not satiated. There should be room for reflection - and also for re-singing. The latter is possible free of charge every morning in the hotel's Living Room together with the Davos Festival Chamber Choir. Deep River sounds ready for performance after half an hour of loosening up, singing and rehearsing with Andreas Felber in five-part harmony. However, a concert is not planned. The joy of singing together is enough for the participants.

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