Dresden, it hardly needs saying, is a city that oozes music: it’s home to one of the oldest orchestras in the world, the Sächsiche Staatskapelle Dresden whose music directors have included Schütz, Hasse, Weber and Wagner and in modern times Böhm, Sanderling, Blomstedt, Haitink and, from the start of the 2012 season, Christian Thielemann. And the orchestra provides the ensemble for the Semper Oper which saw the premieres of Richard Strauss’s Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier (Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony is even dedicated to the orchestra). Dresden is also the city of Volkswagen and the car manufacturer’s support keeps the Dresdner Musikfestspiele in good health.

I’m here for a few days, primarily to moderate a session of the annual North American Music Critics’ Association, but also to take in some music-making. My first concert took place in the decidedly 1960s DDR-style Kulturpalast: there’s a rather dramatic Soviet mural on one wall that celebrates ‘The way of the red flag’. Acoustically it leaves a lot to be desired, dry and slightly harsh, and no doubt encourages a style of playing that has to project hard. The eight double-basses of the Dresden Philharmonic, raised and lined up in a single line along the back of the ensemble, certainly packed quite a punch in Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture; conductor Markus Poschner went for guillotine-edged sforzandi and created some drama if not a lot of subtlety. Vadim Repin joined them for Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, and gave a graceful performance that opted for songfulness over display – something I liked, so it was a shame (for me at least) that it was the finale that was encored rather than the central movement which I enjoyed most.

A late evening concert required an interval departure and we gathered at Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory, a striking glass building that houses the final assembly of VW’s luxuary sedan, the Phaeton, a car that’s not encountered often in the UK and which is aimed at the BWV/Mercedes market. The plant is spotlessly clean and made a terrific backdrop (Phaetons in various states of completion hanging from huge gantries and on operating theatre-esque assembly lines) for an evening with the Moldavian, though Vienna-raised, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaya and family and friends. Kopatchinskaya – who’s familiar from her imaginative CD programmes for Naïve – gave us a whistle-stop tour of some Central European music that was infused with the sounds (and more important) the spirit of folk-music (and faux folk-music as developed in the coffee houses in the late 19th  century). With her father Viktor playing the cimbalom and mother Emilia the violin, we started with folk music and gradually moved through varying degrees of folk-in-art music – Bartók’s Romanian Folkdances, Kurtág’s Duos for violin and cimbalom (stunningly played!), Ravel’s Tzigane and Enescu’s Third Violin Sonata. 

Kopatchinskaya is a virtuoso who approaches this repertoire from the spirit of its roots and influences rather than with a view to its destination in the concert-hall and the sheen that often requires: she’s not afraid of the odd harsh sound or squeal of brakes if she can capture the spirit behind the music. I love the way she handles transitions in tempo and texture with the abruptness that the folk-spirit seems to dictate. And in a work like Tzigane you really sensed the gipsy spirit – the only problem is that Ravel was such an elegant writer for the piano that when that instrument finally enters it gives the game away and we’re back in the salon, however sparky the violin-playing. Pianist Mihaela Ursuleasa was a like-minded partner and in the Enescu they found a perfect balance between the raw folk element (all in fact genuine Enescu) and the really quite forward-sounding ‘art’ world. On one website that carries Kopatchinskaya’s biography there’s a highly apposite quote from Beethoven: ‘Genuine art is opinionated, it cannot be pressed into flattering forms’ and it nicely summed up the spirit of Kopatchinskaya’s approach; she’s fearless and I admire her hugely for that.