The Los Angeles Times
September 4, 2017
By Mark Swed
The Salzburg Festival is back. And it’s time for Los Angeles to pay attention. America lacks a great international music and theater festival. The Lincoln Center Festival, lackluster in recent times and its future uncertain, is the closest. The Music Center is known to be cooking something up.
But right now the grandest classical music gathering of opera, orchestral concerts, recitals, young artist projects, opera camps for children and new music series remains in Austria. It has been around for 97 years, and glamorous, big-name performers continue to flock to Mozart’s birthplace at the scenic foot of the Austrian Alps. Music bigwigs wheel and deal at restaurants facing a festival theater built into the side of a mountain. They pay whatever it takes to see and be seen, parading in finery that ranges from black tie to the occasional formal lederhosen.
Politicians, left and right, come for uncontroversial attention (and a few for the music). While doting on stylish new French President Emmanuel Macron here in late August, Austrian television also dug out 1970s footage of President Gerald R. Ford arriving for the festival and promptly falling down the stairs as he deplaned from Air Force One at the Salzburg Airport.