After the Party – Gravenge: Where Don Quixote Runs and the Youth of Europe Dance

Outside, in the garden, rain was forecast. So it was best to stay indoors on the last night of the first weekend of the festival. I went on a trip to the Grafenegg Hall – with the youngest (and best) symphony orchestra in Europe, which is already 48 years old this year and has been based in Grafenegg for two years.

From there, 120 young musicians aged 16 to 26, newly selected each year from all 27 EU countries, set off on a tour, as they do every summer, to Bolzano and Lucerne, then to Edinburgh and, on Wednesday, to Berlin. But before that, there was a (second) “home match” on Sunday, at the end of this year’s summer residency in Lower Austria. With the young American Carlos Simon, who wrote about his memories of Beethoven’s year “Destiny” and under it “Energy and Movement”. With a not-so-young Englishman, Benjamin Britten, who pays tribute to the Baroque – and sends his orchestra on a journey of variations with a guide. And with a “modern classicist” who allows his “hero” not only to fight against windmills, but also to ride in the air: Richard Strauss.

Here he is, in Simone’s “Fate Triumphs Now” from 2020, incredibly rhythmic and utterly intriguing; here he is, in Britten’s “Young Man’s Guide to the Orchestra,” wonderfully magnificent (almost like Handel’s fireworks music, but here with Purcell’s Maestoso theme), becoming incredibly virtuoso when the violins sparkle, the cellos whisper, the trumpets run, the xylophone winks. And so it is in Strauss’s “Fantastic Variations on a Persian Character” – so vain, but also so sad, so heroic, but also so defiant, so wild, but in the end, also so calm (“Return to my senses”), as mentioned above in the finale), with the energetic cello (Nicola AltstadtViola smiling and sighingPhilippa Rodriguez). And with a brave but also precise conductor (Gianandrea Noseda) On an unbridled orchestral platform – after Elgar's magnificent debut – she danced not only across the stage but across the hall. More like this!