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Happy 252nd, Mozart

Prague celebrates the maestro's birthday with youthful flair
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By Frank Kuznik
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 23rd, 2008 issue

Photos by DANIEL PASCHE
German soprano Annette Dasch makes her Prague debut singing four concert arias 'full of content and meaning.'
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Mozart Gala

When: Sunday, Jan. 27, at 7
Where: Estates Theater
Tickets: 150–2,000 Kč, available at National Theater box offices

Mozart’s birthday, which is being celebrated this weekend with a gala concert at the Estates Theater, where he premiered Don Giovanni in October 1787, is also a reminder that the composer died tragically young, at the age of 35. So it’s appropriate that young talent is being featured at the gala, which offers a tasty mix of chamber music, an orchestral work (the “Jupiter” symphony) and a selection of concert arias sung by Annette Dasch, a German soprano.
Dasch, 31, has never performed in Prague. But she’s been on nearly every important opera stage in Europe, including La Scala, the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin and Opéra National de Paris, and is a regular at festivals in Salzburg, Innsbruck and Vienna. When she spoke to The Prague Post from her home in Berlin earlier this month, she had just returned from a two-night New Year’s Eve gala in Tokyo — and confessed that it wasn’t really her style.
“I’m not a big fan of that kind of concert, where you show off your ‘hit’ arias and your beautiful dress,” she says. “I ask myself, ‘What am I performing here? Am I supposed to try to play the piece, and get into the story of the aria? Or am I just expected to move my arms in a very diva sort of way?’ ”
Dasch tried the latter and found that it left her feeling “empty” afterward, so she got into character on the second night. It didn’t seem to matter to the audience, leaving Dasch feeling like a bit of a misfit.
“I have the impression that everybody else loves doing these things,” she says. “It’s just me that feels awkward!”
But there’s no awkwardness about singing Mozart, whose works comprise the core of Dasch’s repertoire. “Mozart arias are never what you would consider a ‘hit’ aria,” she says. “They’re full of content and meaning, and were written to be performed in exactly the format that we’ll be performing them in Prague. So I don’t have to act like I’m a Verdi singer or something. I can just be myself, and devote myself to the pieces.”
The four arias include two written specifically for Mozart’s biggest fan and patron in Prague, the singer Josefina Dušek, who along with her husband František hosted the composer at their villa Bertramka in what is now Smíchov. According to legend, Mozart had promised Josefina an aria, and finally wrote “Bella mia fiamma” for her around the time of the Don Giovanni premiere after she locked him in a summer house on her estate and refused to let him out until he finished it. He had written “”Ah, lo preverdi” for her 10 years earlier, when she was in Vienna. The other two pieces Dasch will perform are insertion arias that were written in 1789 for the soprano Louise Villeneuve.
“They’re difficult and they’re very beautiful,” Dasch says of the selections.
One might say that of Dasch’s entire repertoire, which spans Haydn to Wagner. It’s an impressive range, particularly for such a comparatively young singer. But Dasch’s career, which took off after she won a stunning three vocal competitions in Barcelona, Zwickau and Geneva in 2000, has hardly been orthodox.
“I never made up a plan like, next year I’ll focus on Schumann, then the year after that Wagner,” she says. “When I get a call asking if I want to do this or that, almost every time, I can be pretty sure about what my heart tells me. If I don’t know the piece, I can look at the music and just feel whether it’s right.”
While Dasch’s development has by no means been erratic, it has been fueled by an unusual degree of confidence and determination.
“It’s my strong belief that if you feel you can do something, you can do it,” she says. “That sounds profane, but I think it’s true. I started at a very early age to perform [Richard] Strauss’s Four Last Songs, when people said, you need to be much more mature for that kind of repertoire. But I just knew that I could do it. I knew that I would not fail, and I didn’t.”
Dasch’s conducting partner at the Mozart gala will be Tomáš Netopil, another young star with an impressive resume. At 32, he’s led orchestras on stages in London, Berlin, Zurich, Rome, Stockholm and Tokyo. A Czech native and trained violinist, he drew critical notice when he won the Sir Georg Solti Conductors Competition in Frankfurt in 2002, and recently debuted new opera productions at the Bayerischen Staatsoper Munich and Palau de la Musica Valencia.
Dasch has performed with Netopil in Naples, and says she’s looking forward to collaborating again. “He’s very enthusiastic, full of energy,” she says. “We got along well.”
That bodes well for the concert, which despite featuring mostly mature works by Mozart is a celebration of youth — as it should be. Whatever its chronological age, the maestro’s music will always sound young at heart, especially in the city that loved him without restraint or reservation.

Frank Kuznik can be reached at fkuznik@praguepost.com


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