Top Trio

Europe's midsummer sun shone on a thriving crop of music festivals last week. Highlights: a new Wagner production, a brilliant new staging of Mozart's Magic Flute and an American harpsichordist playing Bach.

Ansbach's Bach. The eighth annual Bach Week at Ansbach, Germany, brought a personal triumph to Manhattan Harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, 44. Facing a firm Teutonic conviction that only Germans can play Bach properly, Kirkpatrick made a bold decision. While he was playing his morning performance, word came that Guitarist Andres Segovia was sick and could not fill his engagement that evening. Kirkpatrick agreed to take over the spot, scheduled a finger-breaking program : the Italian Concerto, the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue and the Goldberg Variations.

A crowd of 500 crammed the crusty old castle's gold and white Prunksaal--chosen for its fine baroque acoustics--and waited to see how Kirkpatrick would survive. Massive and leonine behind his shell rims, the harpsichordist filled the concerto with muted and lyrical brilliance, the fantasy with stringent clarity, the variations with authoritative grandeur. Then, dead tired, he faced the crowd of critical Bach addicts, smiled like a boy as they cheered, clapped and stamped on the floor with enthusiasm.

Salzburg's Mozart. Salzburg put on a winning Magic Flute, aided by the close harmony between Conductor Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and by Stage Director Herbert Graf's adept use of the vast, open-air Felsenreit-schule* stage. But everyone agreed that it was the sets that gave the new Flute its real magic. Mozart's mystical fantasy of free masonry unfolded among three Egyptian temple arches of flesh-pink, violet, cerulean blue, turquoise, cobalt and yellow. The middle arch was framed by black sketches of symbolic heads, and its opening revealed projected landscapes. Papageno was dressed in a brilliant green feather coat, brick-red vest and yellow trousers, while the chorus of priests appeared in explosive shades of orange.

Responsible for all the color was Austria's famed Painter Oskar Kokoschka, 69, who agreed to design the show out of friendship for the late great Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, who had asked him to do it. Salzburg honored Artist Kokoschka by staging a simultaneous one-man show of his paintings. The press agreed that he was "the real leading actor" in the new Magic Flute.

Bayreuth's Wagner. By comparison with Salzburg's blaze, Bayreuth was authoritative but monochromatic. The latest style for Wagnerian opera, as set by the composer's grandsons Wieland and Wolf gang Wagner (TIME, Aug. 13, 1951, et seq. features a stage in semidarkness, moonlit landscapes, symmetrical crowd scenes and stark emphasis on the polarities of heaven and earth, man and woman, light and darkness, life and death. With their productions of all of Wagner's major works unveiled in previous seasons, the producers this time tried their hand at the youthful but never completely successful Flying Dutchman -- with little bet ter luck than others have had. Somehow, the old seafaring legend failed to fit in with the stark, abstract staging technique that has been brilliantly successful with other Wagner operas. Musically, Bayreuth's Dutchman was superior. Listeners were especially pleased with the Metropolitan Opera's statuesque Soprano Astrid Varnay as Senta. Most popular opera of Bayreuth's season thus far: Tannhduser, with the role of Wolfram sensitively sung by Germany's young (30) Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, a rising new baritone.

* Literally, rocky riding school. It was carved out of a Salzburg hillside to form an area where trained horses performed elaborate steps to music for the amusement of 17th century Archbishop Johann Ernst. Arcades and boxes honeycomb a side wall of solid rock. In 1933 Max Reinhardt used the space for his great production of Goethe's Faust.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.