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Festival celebrates the music of Georg Friedrich Handel
For the last 100 years, the Göttingen International Handel Festival has been an annual highlight for lovers of Baroque music. For this year’s anniversary, the festival presents all 42 Handel operas in a diverse programme in cooperation with, among others, the Staatstheater Oldenburg and the Deutsches Theater Göttingen.
For the first time, the festival brings together three artistic directors, says the managing director Tobias Wolff: “Laurence Cummings with Xerxes, his predecessor Nicholas McGegan with Rinaldo, and his successor George Petrou with Publio Cornelio Scipione – all of them in a new room within the Lokhalle, with great acoustics, created especially for the festival.”The Hip HO pera EZIO: Game of Rome, on the other hand, is a modern interpretation of Handel’s work, staged by 200 teenagers and therefore the largest youth opera project in the festival’s history.
The formation of the Handel festival in 1920 was a pioneering act and the beginning of a 100-year-long history, marked by award-winning productions like Admento, Agrippina or Faramondo, many well-known artists and conductors and, of course, the unique handwriting of each artistic director. Nonetheless, the anniversary will be special, says Tobias Wolff: “We only turn 100 once! And to see all 42 Handel operas in one programme again, people will have to wait a very long time.”