Go Feedback: A music festival in a romantic castle that attracts the world's greatest orchestras and conductors. What's not to like, says Michael Dervan
THE GRAFENEGG Music Festival calls on the world’s greatest orchestras and conductors. Pick a name, there’s a fair chance they’ve been there already. It takes place in the grounds of a romantic castle in Lower Austria, just a stone’s throw from the Danube, not far from the gorgeous landscape of the Wachau Valley, Austria’s most prestigious wine-growing region, and within easy reach of Vienna. It’s got a plethora of on-site eateries and watering holes, and you can picnic on the grass if you want to, though that particular invitation is one that Austria’s music lovers have been rather slow to take up.
What’s not to like? Well, most of the concerts are given out of doors. And years of summer concerts in tents – remember the Carrolls RTÉ Proms and the Adare Festival? – left me in a once-bitten, twice-shy state over the likely musical success of concerts in unorthodox surroundings.
Grafenegg’s outdoor concerts are given in an amphitheatre with a stage called the Wolkenturm. The word translates literally as cloud tower, and the construction, designed by Marie-Therese Harnoncourt and Ernst J Fuchs of Vienna’s next ENTERprise, is as much sculpture as conventional building.
It’s a love it or hate it structure, an angular, almost cubist creation, confidently anti-symmetrical, and with a letter-box slice of clear glass angled across its back wall, allowing audiences a view of natural light above and behind the players.
In the background is the impressive pile of Grafenegg Castle itself, a 19th-century romantic fancy which, its owner Prince Tassilo Metternich-Sándor told me, was left as a roofless ruin following its occupation by Russian troops during and after the second World War. The building could be described as an intoxicating kind of 19th-century post-modern, or as a bizarrely tasteless mixum-gatherum of historical styles, depending on your point of view. Austria is well got for castles and other architectural delights in the baroque style. The romantic excesses of Grafenegg, now lovingly restored, are altogether rarer.
Upstream from Grafenegg, there are the ruins of a medieval castle at Dürnstein, where Richard the Lionheart is said to have been held captive. The steeper of the two routes to it from the picture-postcard town below (complete with tourist-trap shops) takes you over a mixture of bare rock and roughly finished, man-made steps. If you’re up to the 15-20-minute aerobic challenge you can have a well-earned rest while you survey the commanding views of the Danube’s snaking progress.
And when you get back down, you could do worse than chill out at the terrace restaurant of the Schloß Dürnstein Hotel, and watch the mixed traffic on the Danube – pleasure cruises, commercial barges, and the odd power-boat – as they negotiate the rapid flow of a river whose brown colour never yields even the slightest hint of the blue mentioned in Johann Strauss’s waltz.
The slopes of the steep hills reaching down to the Danube are covered in vines and sometimes it seems that wherever you point your gaze you’ll also find an old monastery, church or castle perched in a well protected spot with spectacular views. Further upriver from Dürnstein is the magnificent 18th-century Benedictine abbey at Melk, where the baroque chapel takes the idea of competitive decorative excess to extraordinary heights – if gold doesn’t figure in your conception of beauty, beware!
The roads along the Danube are strewn with signs for Heurigen, restaurant/pubs which showcase local wine and food, and there can’t be many tourists who leave the area without having sampled the delights of the wines from the local grape variety Grüner Veltliner, dry whites which typically have a refreshing light flavour and a touch of sparkle that leaves a tingle on the tongue. You’ll already have found them extolled by this paper’s wine experts, and I managed to spend a fascinating couple of hours with one of the region’s leading winemakers, Willi Bründlmayer, whose Heurigenhof in Langenlois offers fine food as well as fine wine.
Oh, and yes. What about the actual music at the Wolkenturm? From my prime position in the eighth row, the Cleveland Orchestra and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra sounded better than I could have imagined. The sound was dry, of course, and while it was fuller than you could reasonably expect out of doors, it never quite overwhelmed the senses as it might have in a first-rate concert hall. There was even a touch of reverberation that seemed physically implausible, and a slight halo in moments of silence that suggested the subtlest of electronic assistance. But the management says it’s pure.
With Austrian thoroughness, they built a concert hall within a few hundred yards, to which concerts can be transferred in the event of bad weather – the holders of the lowest-priced tickets making do with an indoor video relay. There are even free plastic capes under the seats, in case of the totally unexpected.
- The Grafenegg Music Festival runs until Sunday September 12th, grafenegg.com