If you look, you hear more – Migros Classics are testing new concert formats

Jordi Savall is standing on his head. You wouldn't necessarily have expected this from the 83-year-old doyen of the early music movement – ​​given his dignified appearance, one would rather think of a Spanish grandee who has just stepped out of a Velázquez painting. However, this time another painter was obviously the inspiration, namely Georg Baselitz – because Savall really is standing on his head, at least on all publications for the Migros Culture Percentage Classics concerts. And anyone looking around the Tonhalle Zurich will discover other well-known performers in this unusual posture. For example, the conductor Iván Fischer: His likeness seems to be flying, sailing downwards with his arms outstretched like a fallen angel.

But this isn't about theology, but about the presentation of classical music. The unusual visual concept is an obvious yet effective illustration of the season's motto "180°," which Mischa Damev, the artistic director of Migros Concerts, has given to the current season. And strictly speaking, not just this season. Damev, who has also directed the Festival Septembre Musical in Montreux since 2018, has been thinking about a turnaround in the music industry for some time. And unlike many of his fellow artistic directors, he is serious about the idea of ​​fundamentally turning its practices on their head.

At the beginning of 2023, for example, he alarmed the industry with the idea of ​​halving the sometimes exorbitant fees of top soloists and conductors in order to finance ticket prices of less than fifty francs per concert ticket. If some prominent artists were unwilling to accept this, opportunities would arise for interesting young talent. Otherwise, Damev warned in an interview with the "St. Galler Tagblatt," one day all that would be left would be festivals "where tickets cost 1,000 francs and the same old handful of superstars perform. Just like in the 18th century."

That hit home, and it hit home, as was evident from some of the excited reactions from the music scene. But then the industry ignored Damev's justified analyses and warnings and moved on to business as usual. True to the motto: The audience is still coming, there's still plenty of public funding, and the aforementioned stars are still filling the venues.

But Damev wasn't willing to accept this. Since 2024, he has been trying to reinvent the concert business at the Migros series venues in Zurich, Lucerne, Bern, and Geneva. While ticket prices there haven't yet dropped to the targeted fifty francs, they range between 35 and 130 francs for orchestral concerts – but that's still less than half of what festivals like Lucerne, Salzburg, or Bayreuth charge for the most expensive category. Does that mean what's on offer is even half as good? It's definitely different – ​​truly different.

Damev focuses primarily on the presentation and format of the concerts. The centuries-old separation between stage and audience area particularly bothers him. At the end of 2022, he commissioned Kristjan Järvi, the younger brother of Zurich's music director, to break through the invisible fourth wall in front of the podium, which normally keeps artists and audiences at a distance, with a "Nutcracker Reimagined" project. The impressive opening of the current season in October 2024 also literally brought the music to the listeners: The members of the Aurora Orchestra and conductor Nicholas Collon spread out throughout the Tonhalle hall, playing from memory, and immersed the audience in the soundscape of Ravel's "Boléro."

Since then, the Tonhalle has hosted events in the style of Leonard Bernstein's legendary introductory performances and with live graphic animations. Expanding the concert format with a visual element is not a fundamentally new idea; there is also justified criticism of simply overlaying the acoustic level with scenic impressions. However, if these are meaningfully integrated into the concept, they can become more than a superficial additional attraction. This was exemplified by Jordi Savall's performance with his period sound ensemble Le Concert des Nations.

Savall didn't even have to stand on his head; due to an injury, he actually had to sit. Instead, nine dancers from the Slovenian National Theatre Maribor move across the front of the podium in imaginative poses. The ensemble presents a virtuoso adaptation of Christoph Willibald Gluck's "Don Juan ou le Festin de pierre," which went down in theater history as the first classical narrative ballet. Edward Clug, whose choreographies are also regularly danced by the Zurich Ballet, tells the story of the eternal seducer with a light touch, yet always with a double meaning – similar to what Mozart would do in "Don Giovanni" sixteen years after Gluck.

Gluck's witty music only achieves its dramatic power in individual pieces, such as the final number, "Les Furies," which later also haunt the underworld in "Orfeo ed Euridice." But it is especially in the more conventional dances that one sees how the stage action and Savall's wonderfully vividly modeled music intertwine perfectly, how they can support and enrich each other.

The comparison with the first part of the concert, played without an interval, is all the more revealing: Here, Savall conducted the orchestral suite from Jean-Philippe Rameau's last opera, "Les Boréades," without any staged components. The music, in this elegantly stylized interpretation, was no less colorful and eloquent; the allegorical events, in contrast, remained completely abstract and left entirely to the imagination of the listeners. It's astonishing how strongly this influences the perception of the music.