Amid global turmoil, Sal●burg Festival plans a summer of reflection
With the pandemic still lingering and the war in Ukraine raging on, the Salzburg Festival in Austria announced plans for a summer season that would seek to offer space for reflection.
The festival, classical music’s most storied annual event, will stage two operas based on works by William Shakespeare, Macbeth and Falstaff, both by Verdi. There are also plans for more offbeat repertoire, including Bohuslav Martinu’s The Greek Passion, which tells the story of a Greek village staging a Passion play, in a production led by conductor Maxime Pascal.
“Our present reality seems to be completely out of joint with universal bonds and perspectives,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview, quoting from Hamlet. “Therefore, we have constructed a festival giving artists the opportunity to address these issues directly and indirectly.”
The festival will feature more than 200 events — a mix of operas, spoken drama, orchestra concerts and recitals — over six weeks beginning July 20.
The festival’s house band, the Vienna Philharmonic, will perform several concerts, including Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), an hourlong choral work by Brahms, under conductor Christian Thielemann. Among other prominent orchestras making appearances are the Berlin Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli will star in Gluck’s Orfeo Ed Euridice; conductor John Eliot Gardiner will lead a concert performance of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, featuring his ensemble, the Monteverdi Choir; and soprano Renée Fleming and pianist Evgeny Kissin team up for a recital of works by Schubert, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Duparc.
Franz Welser-Möst, music director of the Cleveland Orchestra and a Salzburg regular, will take the baton for Macbeth, which opens in July, in a production by Krzysztof Warlikowski. In August, Welser-Möst will lead the Vienna Philharmonic in a concert featuring works by Ligeti and Richard Strauss.
The festival will again prominently feature conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has faced scrutiny since the start of the war in Ukraine because of his ties to a state-owned bank in Russia. He will take the baton for a concert presentation of Henry Purcell’s opera The Indian Queen with his new ensemble, Utopia. Currentzis will also lead Utopia in performances of Mozart’s Mass In C Minor.
Currentzis announced the formation of Utopia, which is backed by European benefactors, in August, after he faced a wave of criticism for his longtime association with the Russian ensemble MusicAeterna, which is sponsored by VTB Bank, a state-owned institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries. (Currentzis had been trying for several years to secure funding for Utopia.)
While the pandemic has wreaked havoc across the performing arts, the Salzburg Festival, drawing on government subsidies and sponsorship deals, has managed to minimise disruption.
The festival never cancelled a season during the pandemic. In 2020, it staged a robust programme for limited audiences, before returning to relative normalcy in 2021.
Even as turnout for many classical events around the world has been tepid since the return of live performance, the Salzburg Festival continues to attract an enthusiastic audience. Attendance was 96% last summer, the festival said. © 2022