Alpine meadows and admirable architecture

“Of course, we’re all supposed to wear lederhosen or dirndls” she said, rather tartly. The idea of my elegant dinner companion in anything so homely was charmingly ludicrous but she had a point. The Alps, in the popular imagination, are a wholesome but kitschy amalgam of tinkling cowbells, pigtailed girls and chalet balconies overflowing with red geraniums: Heidi and the Von Trapp family have much to answer for.

But times change, and so has Austria’s westernmost province. Far from milking the alpine clichés, Vorarlberg has embraced the contemporary, developing an international reputation for its progressive and environmentally friendly approach to modern architecture. My dinner companion was Marina Hämmerle, director of the Vorarlberger Architektur Institut and an embodiment of the region’s sophistication. The setting was the café terrace of the handsome modern Bregenz Festspielhaus, nerve centre of the city’s annual festival .

Bregenz is the capital of Vorarlberg but it is also a small city with a beautiful setting on the shores of Lake Constance. From the top of the local mountain, the Pfänder, it has a toytown neatness. The alpine meadows may still smell of fresh-cut hay and the pale green of the grass is still interspersed with the darker green of the forests but these days Vorarlberg’s trees are harvested responsibly for use as untreated building materials by the region’s architects, who in creating a new regional vernacular, have left alpine cuteness far behind them. The cable-car ride to the top of the Pfänder displays the results to great effect, its lower slopes dotted with stylish villas as covetable as anything from architect Richard Neutra’s Los Angeles or 1950s Palm Springs but with living roofs instead of kidney-shaped swimming pools as the most characteristic design feature. They are, as Hämmerle says, the visiting cards of the region’s architects.

With the Swiss and German borders within cycling distance of the lakefront gardens, there’s an effortlessly cosmopolitan air about the centre of Bregenz, yet peace is never far away. On a sultry summer night, I took a moonlit stroll to the fortified medieval upper town, as tiny and beguiling as a Provençal village perché. From up there, the sound of a tenor’s clear voice hung in the still air, part of the final rehearsals for the Bregenz Festival. But, as I returned to the busy lower town, the music was engulfed by the hubbub of a wine market that filled the streets with an almost Mediterranean exuberance. Contented locals sampled wines direct from their Italian producers, the whites cooling casually in a pretty stone fountain.

Vorarlberg’s present-day artistic and architectural flair has roots in the region’s history. During the baroque era, Vorarlberg’s builders were known for the sophistication of their craftsmanship , while the celebrated 18th-century painter Angelika Kauffmann was the daughter of a travelling artist from the Bregenzerwald and considered the region her homeland, though she lived variously in London, Rome and Venice. To mark the 200th anniversary of her death, the Vorarlberg Landesmuseum is staging a retrospective of her works this summer.

A few metres to the north, stands the Kunsthaus Bregenz, a remarkable contemporary art museum that is celebrating its 10th anniversary. I spent a morning enjoying works by Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys among others in this refined setting, before hiking up to the old town again, noticing this time not just the venerable walls and tall gables but the subtle and pleasing modern houses inserted tactfully into the townscape.

Nowhere is Bregenz’s flair for the visual so flamboyantly displayed as in its annual festival, which stages difficult or neglected operas alongside the big-name productions on its famous open air lakeside stage. Always audacious, the staging can be full of contemporary significance, as in the production of West Side Story for which the floating stage resembled the tangled remains of the World Trade Center. This year’s production is Puccini’s Tosca, its tale of Napoleonic-era repression memorably represented in Bregenz by the Big Brother eye – a televisual image here reproduced as a 220-tonne set, as tall as an office building and as technically complex as any theme park ride. Monitors placed around the lakeside amphitheatre ensure the singers maintain eye contact with the conductor, the sophisticated surround sound system has 800 speakers and there’s a hidden army of specialists including divers and stuntmen to make sure everything goes according to plan.

Ultimately, of course, it all has to appear effortless and magical, and it’s Puccini’s music and the singers, not the staging, that are the stars of the show. At first I’m not sure it can work yet, as the plot develops, music and setting fuse to create a breathtaking illusion. Despite the 7,000-strong audience, it’s a remarkably intimate experience, never more so than when Tosca herself sings one of the opera’s most famous and dramatic arias, “Vissi d’arte” (“I lived for art”), before stabbing the tyrannical Scarpia to death.

Rather like Vorarlberg itself, it may be beautiful but you wouldn’t necessarily call it cute.

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Artistic highs

Neville Walker was a guest of the Vorarlberg State Tourist Board www.vorarlberg.travel

The Angelika Kauffmann retrospective runs at the Vorarlberger Landesmuseum in Bregenz (www.vlm.at) and at the Angelika Kauffmann Museum in Schwarzenberg (www.angelika-kauffmann.com) until November 5.

“Mythos” at the Kunsthaus Bregenz (www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at) includes works by Cy Twombly and Joseph Beuys and continues until September 9.

“Tosca” at the Bregenz Festival (www.bregenzerfestspiele.com) continues until August 19.