5 Breakouts From Classical Music’s Most Prestigious Festival

The Salzburg Festival has, since its founding more than 100 years ago, been known as a gathering place for the world’s finest musicians.

That’s still true: During a visit there earlier this month, I heard Grigory Sokolov play Bach with unfussy authority; Jordi Savall lead his period orchestra in magisterial accounts of Beethoven’s final two symphonies; Igor Levit muscle through another Beethoven symphony, the bacchic Seventh, with just a piano.

But Salzburg is also a proving ground for artists on the cusp on stardom. The soprano Asmik Grigorian, for example, was busy but hardly world famous until she gave a career-making performance as Salome there in 2018.

This year, there were breakthroughs to be found throughout Salzburg’s theaters. If you looked past the top billing, past the Cecilia Bartolis and Teodor Currentzises, they were even at some of the most high-profile events this summer. Here are five of them.

In a bit of scheduling serendipity, Levit’s recital took place during the same weekend that the Austrian pianist Lukas Sternath, his former student, was debuting with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg. It was touching to see Levit in the balcony of the Mozarteum’s ornate Grosser Saal, looking down as Sternath eloquently performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor (K. 466) under the baton of Adam Fischer.

Sternath matched the orchestra’s bite in the volatile opening of the first movement, his touch precise and bright, but he was at his best during the concerto’s most lyrical passages. With a sound distinct from Levit’s, he nevertheless has his teacher’s uncanny gift of communicating through the piano as if it were a tuneful cello. His thoughts, mature and considered, couldn’t have been more vividly expressed.

Anna Tetruashvili

Robert Carsen’s new staging of Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” transports the opera’s ancient Roman tale to the present. With echoes of Giorgia Meloni’s Italy and the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the production, at the Haus für Mozart, does away with trouser roles for a lesbian political thriller in which Annio is a young woman, sweetly sung by the Israeli mezzo-soprano Anna Tetruashvili.

Annio is a secondary role, used more as a plot device than anything, but it requires an emotional journey of youthful passion, fury and earnest pleading. Tetruashvili, who spent last season as a member of the Opera Studio at the Gärtnerplatz Theater in Munich, persuasively shifted from one feeling to the next, with a tone that was unwaveringly beautiful, and at times startlingly fierce.

Hankyeol Yoon

As the most recent winner of the Herbert von Karajan Young Conductors Award, the South Korean conductor and composer Hankyeol Yoon was given a concert with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Felsenreitschule. He programmed the world premiere of his “Gium (Longing),” as well as Bruch’s First Violin Concerto (with Maria Dueñas, another brilliant young artist) and Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony.

“Gium” unfolds like a musical scrapbook of Yoon’s memories from Seoul and Europe, of his travels as he was educated and came of age. Its harmonic language may be generically modern, but the piece is skillfully crafted, with an intuitive sense for orchestral writing and subtle nods that avoided being cheaply overt. (The clearest reference, to the chime of Big Ben, got a chuckle of recognition that belied how ambivalently and intelligently it was being used.) A piece so personal could, like the Bruch and Tchaikovsky, easily sink into sentimentality; Yoon, though, kept it all moving with unwavering vitality.

Xenia Puskarz Thomas

It almost feels cruel to single out anyone from the cast of Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s “The Idiot,” the greatest triumph of this year’s festival. With Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s spirited baton in the pit, and fearless singers onstage, Salzburg has given this rarity the showing it has needed to take hold in the operatic canon.

Beyond the leading trio of singers, though, the Australian mezzo-soprano Xenia Puskarz Thomas repeatedly asserted her presence on the vast stage of the Felsenreitschule as the confidently idealistic Aglaya. Bogdan Volkov, as the protagonist Prince Myshkin, flinched in her presence, and it was easy to see why. Thomas, a member of the Opera Studio at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, has a small frame but a big sound that easily soared over Weinberg’s thick orchestration, in monologues of exasperation, flirtation and rage delivered with the skill of a seasoned actor.

Sean Panikkar

The American tenor Sean Panikkar is by all measures an established artist. He has sung at the Metropolitan Opera and is no stranger to the great stages of Europe, specializing in contemporary repertoire and adventurous fare like works by Henze and Nono. But for some reason, he isn’t the star he deserves to be.

Panikkar’s sound is creamy and elegant. As Gandhi in Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” the smoothness of his voice made for meditative serenity. But as Alexei in Prokofiev’s “The Gambler” at Salzburg, he was ferocious. (He and Grigorian, as Polina, seemed to feed off each other’s intensity.) Almost never leaving the stage, and almost always singing with heldentenor strength, he gave the performance of an Olympian: superhuman and mesmerizing.