DRESDEN — When the Geneva Camerata performed Revolta, a powerful staging of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, during the 2025 Dresden Music Festival, protests were taking place in Los Angeles against immigration raids by ICE. Revolta incorporates Krump — an improvisational, aggressive dance form that originated in South Central L.A. in the early aughts — creating an unintended connection between the German and American cities.
In a video posted on the Camerata’s website, a dancer describes Krump, which features foot stomping, break dance, and pantomimed battle, as “a way to escape reality and to fight social injustice discrimination and racism.” Initially, Jan Vogler, artistic director of the festival since 2009, wasn’t convinced about programming Revolta because he found it hard to describe, “and we have to be able to describe works we program to the audience,” he said during an interview in Dresden. But his artistic administrators convinced him to go ahead. The audience on June 9 at the Kulturpalast — a modernist theater built in the communist era and refurbished in 2017 — seemed to love it.
The signature aesthetic of the Camerata, co-founded by the pianist and conductor David Greilsammer, blends music and movement. The ensemble premiered Revolta (an arrangement for chamber orchestra choreographed by Kader Attou) in 2022, and the ensemble seemed at ease as they performed the entire symphony from memory. The musicians pantomimed duels with bows and stomped their feet as they surrounded the four dancers, identified as Grichka, Melissa, Dexter, and Hendrickx. At one point, a violinist played atop the grand piano.
Greilsammer corralled the crouching, stomping musicians as they moved about the stage, his arm gestures mirroring the sculpted, forceful shapes of the dancers’ limbs. During the percussion crescendo of the last movement, the musicians shouted as they danced. It was a musically incisive and theatrically mesmerizing performance.
Revolta was part of the eclectic lineup of this year’s Dresden festival, which was founded in 1978. Performances of orchestral and chamber music, song recitals, opera, world music, and jazz take place at venues including Baroque buildings destroyed when the allies bombed Dresden at the end of World War II and rebuilt in the ensuing decades. Historic venues include the 1,300-seat Semperoper Dresden, where many of Richard Strauss’ operas had their premieres. The opera house was in ruins until reconstruction began in 1977 and the hall reopened in 1985 with stunning marble columns. Another historic site is the Frauenkirche, the Lutheran church whose reconstruction was completed in 2005.
A 20th anniversary “Concert for Peace” took place in the Frauenkirche on May 9, featuring musicians from the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. Asked about recent protests against the Israeli ensemble in the U.S., Vogler said, “If you think about the history of the Israel Philharmonic, it is part of our history also,” adding that he disagrees with protesting cultural institutions because of the actions of their government. “I was born in East Germany, and I came to West Germany and to the Marlboro Music Festival before the wall came down,” he said. “People were intelligent enough to say, ‘Tell us about your family,’ or ‘Tell us what it’s like living in East Germany.’ But nobody said ‘You must be a communist.’ These generalizations are so stupid.”
Visiting orchestras in this year’s festival, which took place May 17-June 14, included the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra. The festival lineup also included the fado singer Mariza, the pop singer Ronan Keating, and the Xi’an Orchestra of Traditional Chinese Music.
I attended the final week of the festival, whose theme this year was love. The idea of music as a healing force is almost a cliché, but one Vogler felt important to highlight in the current zeitgeist of cruelty.
Scientists such as Daniel J. Levitin have revealed that listening to music stimulates the release of opioids in the brain, boosting happiness, the immune systems, and yes, feelings of love. The festival contributed their own findings, partnering with the Technical University of Dresden to assess the oxytocin levels of 200 listeners after a concert at the Dresden Center of Regenerative Therapies, part of the festival’s Sound & Science component.
Analysis revealed that levels of oxytocin, also known as the “happy hormone” and “love hormone,” were five times higher by the end of the concerts, rising from 37.54 pg/ml to an average of 203.17 pg/ml.
Love was certainly in the air during a beautifully sung program of romantic songs performed by the French mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre and the lutenist Thomas Dunford at the Baroque Palais im Großen Garten (Grand Garden Palace) on June 11 that featured songs by Honoré d’Ambruys, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, André Messager, Sébastian Le Camus, and Françoise Hardy, the French singer-songwriter who died last year at age 80. “Literature Meets Music” — a lieder program inspired by the poet Heinrich Heine featuring baritone Benjamin Appl and pianist James Baillieu — proved less rewarding, as no translations of the extensive narration by the actors Barbara Auer and Jens Harzer were provided for non-German speakers. The music-making was certainly superb, however, with Baillieu demonstrating his gifts as a collaborative pianist and Appl showcasing his elegant, expressive voice.
Vogler said several international tour groups visited the festival, which only intermittently caters to non-German speakers. Program notes, for example, are offered only in German. But English and German surtitles were provided for the festival finale, a historically informed concert performance of Wagner’s Siegfried. Since 2023, the festival has been anchored by The Wagner Cycles, a collaboration between musicologists, linguists, Vogler, the Dresden Festival Orchestra, Concerto Köln, and conductor Kent Nagano. Beginning in 2023 with Das Rheingold, Nagano has led concert performances of one opera from the Ring in European cities. The 2025 schedule included Siegfried in Prague, Paris, Cologne, and Dresden and will conclude in September with a performance in Lucerne.
This is not your grandmother’s Wagner: Instead of a vibrato-heavy, thundering sound, instrumental and vocal textures are transparent and vibrato-free as played on period instruments. The approach “didn’t cause the scandal among the Wagnerians I was expecting,” said Vogler.
Siegfried, in which the title character and Brünnhilde are overcome with love for each other in the third act, certainly seemed an apt conclusion to this amorous-themed festival. The rich-voiced tenor Thomas Blondelle carried the five-hour performance as Siegfried, his vocal stamina never flagging. Åsa Jäger was a powerful, expressive Brünnhilde, Daniel Schmutzhard a sinister Alberich, and Simon Bailey a stentorian-voiced Wotan/the Wanderer. The strong cast also included Thomas Ebenstein as Mime and Hanno Müller-Brachmann as Fafner. A member of the Tölzer Knabenchor was cast as the forest bird instead of an adult soprano, a delightful touch. Nagano’s brisk tempos kept the pace moving, and the five-hour performance rarely faltered.
The festival’s Siegfried was in jeopardy after Germany’s coalition government collapsed on Nov. 6, 2024, the same day as the U.S. election, meaning that funding that had been scheduled for approval couldn’t be approved. So Vogler worked the phones, and a “very generous private donor” stepped in. Vogler, who resides in New York and — perhaps unlike many European colleagues — has an entrepreneurial energy and ease with private-sector fundraising, is optimistic about securing funding for Götterdämmerung in 2026, which will mark the 150th anniversary of the premiere of the complete cycle at Bayreuth.
The ever-present struggles of artists and cultural institutions, whether artistic or financial, isn’t necessarily a bad thing, according to Vogler. “Artists should not be easygoing. There is always some kind of creative tension to achieve your goals.”
