The Star of That Other Austrian Fest

Graz is not Salzburg. For one thing, the capital of the Austrian province of Styria has no universally idolized native-son composer to exploit.

The city does, however, have an attractive riverside setting to match Salzburg’s, handsome old buildings and even a summer music festival, Styriarte, which, unlike Salzburg’s estival bash, is built and priced to a human scale. And Graz has something Salzburg no longer has: a living musical icon in conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a Grazer by upbringing and Styriarte’s guiding spirit.

Harnoncourt sparked a musical revolution three decades ago when his fascination with old instruments and how they might have been played led to his creation of the first permanent period band, Concentus Musicus Wien.

He asked the important questions about 18th-Century performance practice. But Harnoncourt’s influence--and there isn’t an antiquarian musician around untouched by his notions--has been manifest as much in negative reaction to his answers as to his successes. Harnoncourt has started arguments (his time frame now expanded to include the early Romantics) and inspired dialogue. He has proved to be, above all, a great motivator.

Harnoncourt rarely visits the United States, but live recordings of his European performances, with the Concentus and the modern-instrument Chamber Orchestra of Europe, are appearing with increasing frequency.

A recent Graz festival theme has been the music of Mendelssohn, played by the COE but in the dynamically blunt and somewhat lumpy style Harnoncourt favors for older music on older instruments (he is enamored of the weighty, emphatic downbeat).

Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” and “Italian” symphonies (Teldec 72308) project an appealing rustic energy when subjected to this approach, as opposed to the usual string-heavy slickness.

The horns are urged to play with a rough edge, audibly contributing to the spicy harmonies that go by the boards in more casual, texturally dense versions. And the employment of valveless trumpets, with their clear, cutting tones amid the modern instruments, is an enhancing innovation.

Harnoncourt’s Mozart opera interpretations are eccentric, to say the least. So it comes as a pleasant surprise to encounter his self-effacingly supportive accompaniments in a program of Mozart’s showiest concert arias, delivered with spectacular aplomb by soprano Edita Gruberova (Teldec 72303).

In performances recorded during two concerts in Graz last year, she fearlessly scales the heights--a top C is merely the beginning of Gruberova’s, and the arias’, upper range--in as impressive a display of above-the-staff pyrotechnics and, elsewhere, lyric grace as one is likely to encounter today.

Shining examples of this singer’s artistry are too numerous to detail, but one might single out the intensely moving “Vorrei spiegarvi,” with the COE’s uncredited oboist providing a superlative obbligato. A recording not to be missed.

The other Viennese Mozart memorial concert on Dec. 5, 1991, saw the illuminati joining Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the Musikverein for the last three symphonies, while the hoi polloi jammed St. Stephen’s Cathedral for the Solti-Vienna Philharmonic Mozart Requiem. Neither event offered musical revelations, to judge by the recorded documentation.

The Harnoncourt concert, preserved in a two-CD Teldec set (74858), offers readings that are in the main graceless--possibly by design, to counter what this conductor regards as others’ wimpiness. But here the E-flat Symphony is humorless as well and the G-minor enervated, while the curiously stop-and-go “Jupiter” first movement and its blasty Andante are simply ugly.

The oratorio version of Joseph Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ” (the composer’s arrangement for string quartet is better known) is alone among these releases in uniting Harnoncourt and the old instruments of Concentus Musicus (Teldec 46458).

Theirs is a handsomely executed, dramatic reading of a somber, deeply affecting score, with the conductor maintaining extraordinary tension at the prescribed slow tempos.

And another, often overlooked ingredient of some of Harnoncourt’s most successful work is present here: the splendidly flexible and polished Arnold Schoenberg Chorus of Vienna, the same group that reportedly made such a heroic contribution to the L.A. Philharmonic’s recent performances of Messiaen’s “St. Francois” at the Salzburg Festival.