On my first night at the Salzburg Festival, a friend and I were talking outside the House for Mozart, about to go in for a piano recital. “They are dressing a lot more casually here now,” he said. “The men, I mean. I have noticed this since the pandemic.” My friend was talking about the men in the audience—but does his observation apply to those onstage, too?

Evgeny Kissin, the evening’s recitalist, came out in a black shirt, no jacket. “But this is standard attire for musicians these days!” you say—and you are right. But Kissin has been almost the last bastion of concert tails. He is a throwback of a pianist. Nonetheless, he was dressed down on this occasion.

He played the program he had been playing for months. Indeed, he had played it twice at Carnegie Hall in the month of May. The program began with Beethoven’s Sonata in E minor, Op. 90—a sonata off the beaten path. It is good that Kissin is presenting it. The sonata is in two movements only, and the second is a song, rather Schubertian—although that is an anachronistic word to use: Beethoven precedes Schubert.

Earlier, in Carnegie Hall, Kissin had proven his ability to play songfully. In one of those recitals? Actually, the month before, when he had accompanied Matthias Goerne, the baritone, in a program of Schumann and Brahms.

In Salzburg, Kissin played his program—all of it—as he can be expected to play. You and I may have objections, to this and that. But there is never any doubt of Kissin’s care, his utter devotion to his craft. By the evidence, no one takes it more seriously or loves it more.

These days, in many places, a standing ovation is nearly automatic (which perhaps diminishes the honor of a standing ovation). In the House for Mozart, no one stood. Between encores, a man behind me said to his companion, “I feel like we should stand.” I’m not sure whether they did. I thought I saw on Kissin’s face a trace of disappointment, as he headed to the wings. But he has had a career of pandemonium, usually standing.

Among the operas staged at the festival this season was an unfamiliar one, The Idiot, by Mieczysław Weinberg (based on Dostoevsky, of course). The composer wrote it in the mid-1980s. It was premiered in 2013, well after his death. Weinberg lived from 1919 to 1996.

Was he Polish? Soviet? Russian? The answer, really, is yes. He was born in Warsaw, where his parents were involved in the Yiddish theater. He graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory in 1939 (an inauspicious year, to say the least). When the war came, he fled east, to the Soviet Union, where he stayed for the rest of his life. His family was murdered in the Holocaust.

Weinberg was arrested in February 1953. Why? In the Soviet Union, it did not really matter. His life was spared by the death of Stalin the next month. Weinberg became friends with Shostakovich, who aided his career. In recent decades, Weinberg has been championed by Gidon Kremer, the Latvian violinist.

In 1968, Weinberg composed The Passenger, a Holocaust opera. The authorities refused to allow it to be performed, on grounds that it was “cosmopolitan” (i.e., Jewish). The opera had its first staging in 2010, and it appeared in New York four years later. (I wrote about the opera in these pages, in September 2014.)

As for The Idiot, it is an intelligent, generally compelling work, bearing the influence of Shostakovich (while not being imitative). For me, three hours of Dostoevskyan torment is a lot—but other people may have a higher tolerance for it.

The opera certainly received an excellent performance in Salzburg. In the title role—the sensitive Prince Myshkin, judged an “idiot”—was Bogdan Volkov, a Ukrainian tenor. He is a lightish lyric—I had heard him twice before as Fenton in Verdi’s Falstaff—but he also demonstrated a kind of strength, which helped him. He sang beautifully and was totally sympathetic as this unusual fellow.

Vladislav Sulimsky, the Belarusian baritone who was Rogozhin, is a very good singing actor. In key moments, he was no less than gripping. Aušrinė Stundytė is a similar kind of singer. I have never heard, or seen, a better Elektra (in the Strauss opera). And she was dynamite as Nastasya Filippovna, the femme fatale in The Idiot.

Stundytė is a Lithuanian soprano, like another star at the festival, Asmik Grigorian. (The latter has an Armenian father.) Stundytė studied with Grigorian’s mother, the soprano Irena Milkevičiūtė—by all accounts a splendid teacher, and a splendid singer as well, who would have had a bigger career if not for the strictures of the Soviet Union.

In the pit was the resident orchestra of the festival, the Vienna Philharmonic. The conductor was another Lithuanian, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. The production was in the hands of a Polish stage director, Krzysztof Warlikowski, who was imaginative and reasonable at the same time (proving that it can be done).

I wish Mieczysław Weinberg could know—know that his opera was performed by the Vienna Philharmonic and an outstanding cast at the world’s most prestigious festival.

Salzburg is Mozart’s town, and the festival staged two of his operas: Don Giovanni and La clemenza di Tito. I remember a Tito at the festival in 2003, with a killer cast: Michael Schade, Dorothea Röschmann, Barbara Bonney, Vesselina Kasarova, Elīna Garanča, Luca Pisaroni. The orchestra was the Vienna Philharmonic, the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Garanča was a newcomer, a slip of a girl at the time. She caused a stir throughout the music world. Now she is a senior stateswoman in Salzburg (who this summer gave a recital with the pianist Malcolm Martineau).

In the pit for this recent Tito was a period band: Les Musiciens du Prince, from Monaco. A member of the Vienna Philharmonic told me something interesting, and worrisome:

First, people said that we really shouldn’t play Baroque music. It is not “correct” for an orchestra like ours to play Bach, Handel, and the others. Now people are saying we shouldn’t play Classical music, including Mozart.

For almost two centuries, the Vienna Phil has played Mozart—symphonies, concertos, operas—conducted by such Mozarteans as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Josef Krips, Karl Böhm, and James Levine. Were those men wrong? Was the orchestra wrong? If the Vienna Philharmonic ever drops Mozart, it is Mozart who will be wronged.

The stage director for Tito was Robert Car­sen, the estimable Canadian. Tito is a Roman tale, of course, but the production was sleek and modern: smartphones, E.U. flags, and so on. (I believe there was video of January 6.) Nothing wrong with updating, often. But, to my sense, the eye and the ear did not match. From the pit, we heard a period band, with plinky recitatives. But the stage was up-to-the-minute.

People are funny: they want “authenticity” and “correctness” in the pit—or their idea of those things—and they say “anything goes” when it comes to the stage.

This Tito was largely a vehicle for Cecilia Bartoli, the legendary mezzo-soprano. “Legendary”? Yes, she is a living legend, and has been for some time. Obviously, she retains all her smarts and vitality. I would be happy to listen to this woman until she is a hundred and six. But it is my duty to report that, on this night, her voice betrayed the toll of years.

Salzburg has regular pianists, most of them born in the Soviet Union (and living in the West for decades): Kissin, Grigory Sokolov, Arcadi Volodos, Yefim Bronfman, Igor Levit. Alexandre Kantorow bids to be another regular pianist. He was born in France, in 1997. He won the Tchaikovsky Competition, in Moscow, in 2019. It would be hard to imagine the competition he would not win.

He played a recital in the House for Mozart, beginning with Brahms’s Rhapsody in B minor, Op. 79, No. 1. The first note I jotted down in my program was “non-bangy.” I am used to hearing this music banged. It was strange, the way Kantorow was playing it: nuanced, subtle. French. He has a wonderful sense of touch, a wonderful sense of color. Gradually, I liked this rendering of the Rhapsody. I never knew it was so interesting, had so much in it.

Kantorow went on to Liszt, the last of the Transcendental Études, “Chasse-neige.” It is a very, very difficult piece (like all of those études). But in Kantorow’s hands, it was practically child’s play. His technique is relaxed and all-capable. From where I was sitting, it appeared that he has long arms, big hands, long fingers—like Earl Wild. “Chasse-neige” was simply beautiful, with no effortfulness, sounding like its title (“Snow whirls”).

There was more Liszt: “Vallée d’Obermann” from Years of Pilgrimage (which many of us associate with Vladimir Horowitz). Again, “non-bangy,” non-poundy. That was extraordinary. The virtuosic storms were amazingly beautiful.

Kantorow ended the first half of his recital with Bartók: the Rhapsody, Op. 1 (which, let’s face it, is more Lisztian than Bartókian, as we would come to know Bartók). I will give you just one of my notes: “the sweetest little glisses you ever heard” (“glisses” being short for “glissandos”).

At intermission, some of us blinked our eyes and stammered to say what we thought.

The second half of the recital began with a Rachmaninoff sonata—not the sonata, which is No. 2, in B-flat minor, but No. 1, in D minor (which is seldom heard and, frankly, a much inferior work to its great successor). Kantorow demonstrated once more that he cares a great deal about touch, nuance, color. His Rachmaninoff had exceptional tenderness (to go with power and others of the composer’s qualities).

Last on the printed program was Bach’s Chaconne in D minor, arranged by Brahms for the left hand alone. The Chaconne—whether played on the violin, the piano, or the kazoo—should be characterized by angelic strength. On this night, it was. I might give you a sidenote, of a mechanical nature.

Playing with the left hand alone, some pianists grip the piano with their right hand, for stability. Last season, I saw Seong-jin Cho do this all through the Ravel concerto. But I also saw Yuja Wang play the concerto without ever touching the piano with her right hand. In one stretch of the Chaconne—and one stretch only—Mr. Kantorow gripped the piano.

When he returned from the wings for his first encore, he started doodling at the piano, as pianists did of old (Wilhelm Backhaus et al.). Before long, he was playing some treatment of Delilah’s aria “Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix” (Saint-Saëns). For a second and final encore, he played a masterpiece of Impressionism: Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau.” It was a model of such playing.

Alexandre Kantorow is twenty-seven years old. Pianists such as Alfred Brendel and Maurizio Pollini played at the Salzburg Festival for fifty-plus years. I would bet that Kantorow will be playing there, to venerating audiences, in 2075.

What’s the most important thing in opera? Singing, right? Well, that is debatable. For The Tales of Hoffmann, Offenbach’s phantasmagorical hit, the festival had assembled an excellent cast. Benjamin Bernheim, the French tenor—a Gallic Wunderlich—was Hoffmann. Kathryn Lewek, the American soprano, portrayed the Four Heroines. (She can sing Olympia’s aria—acrobatic—the way other people can sing something basic, such as “Caro mio ben.”) Christian Van Horn, the American bass-baritone, portrayed the Four Villains, with suave, potent villainy. And so on.

The production was a show-within-a-show—or a show-within-a-show-within-a-show? We were not watching The Tales of Hoffmann, you see. We were watching people put together a Tales of Hoffmann for television. Or something. I did not understand the production and, in all candor, could not bother to care.

On hand was the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Marc Minkowski. A friend made an astute comment during the first intermission: “It didn’t swing. The score is not swinging.” To my mind, this performance was “insuperably dull,” to borrow a phrase from William F. Buckley Jr.

Singing is not everything. Other things count. A frustrating night.

An evening of chamber music was provided by the Belcea Quartet. The ensemble is named for its first violinist, Corina Belcea, Romanian-born. She formed the quartet in 1994 with fellow students at the Royal College of Music, London. I began this chronicle with a sartorial note, and I will make another one now: in Salzburg, the men of the quartet wore what appeared to be black sweatshirts. If performers dress like this (which is fine with me, by the way), why should men in the audience continue to wear coats and ties?

There were two works on the program, a masterpiece and a near masterpiece (in my judgment): Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131, and Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 1 in D minor, Op. 7. The Belcea Quartet played them in the opposite order—the later work first.

At intermission, I said to a couple of musician friends, “The performance we have just heard is the hardest kind to review.” “Why?” they asked. The answer: Because there was nothing wrong with it. The work was well played, in all the particulars. But the performance did not move me (and this is a very moving work). We are in the realm of the personal, the subjective.

How about the Beethoven quartet? It, too, was well played, by this thoroughly professional group. Was it moving? In great stretches—even whole movements—yes.

The ensemble played an encore, a movement from a Britten quartet. Something happened with which an audience member can sympathize entirely: the violist could not stop coughing (and this was a quiet movement, a slow movement). As the musicians moved back to the wings, the violist said to Ms. Belcea, “I’m sorry.” She seemed forgiving.

Down from Norway came the Oslo Philharmonic, led by its chief conductor, Klaus Mäkelä, a fabulous Finn. Maestro Mäkelä is twenty-eight. In addition to his post in Norway, he works in France, where he is the music director of the Orchestre de Paris. Starting in 2027, he will be in charge of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam) and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, simultaneously. Is that wise? It is so.

The first half of the Oslo Philharmonic concert brought the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, with Lisa Batiashvili, the Georgian, as soloist. She was poised, mature, as always. There is no falsity in her, even when she plays a “showpiece.” She gave an encore, in partnership with Mäkelä—who is a cellist. They played a duo by Sibelius, Water Droplets. (Lasts about forty seconds—a neat encore.)

On the second half of the program was the Shostakovich Fifth. I have written about Mäkelä before and will again, no doubt, over and over. He is a big, big talent. He has an uncanny gift for matching physicality (his own) with music. The Oslo Philharmonic is a commendable group, but it is at a disadvantage in Salzburg, the summer home of the Vienna Philharmonic. Listening to the Vienna Phil is like drinking whole milk, or cream. Other orchestras can taste like skim. But in this world, often unfriendly to high culture, we need every drop we can get.