Bregenz Festival already satisfied with 2023 Season before it starts
ERNANI diREctor LOTTE DE BEER: “IMPERFEct stories say a lot about US IMPERFEct beings”
TANCREDI to be opera house production of 2024
Vienna/Bregenz, 6.6.23. There’s still a month to go before Butterfly spreads its wings over the shore of Lake Constance at Bregenz. Puccini’s spectacular opera is the highlight of this year’s Bregenz Festival when it returns for its second run. The day before Andreas Homoki’s production opens on the lake stage on 20 July, the Festspielhaus will premiere Verdi’s Ernani. The opera will be directed by Lotte de Beer, who admitted to being quite taken with its confusing libretto when speaking at a press conference in Vienna on Tuesday.
"Imperfect stories say so much about us imperfect beings,” de Beer, director of the Volksoper Wien, declared. "It moves the whole time between total entertainment and great drama. And after all, if you look at life, it’s often like that, too."
The Bregenz Festival will continue the Italian theme in the 2024 season as well, at least at the Festspielhaus, as artistic director Elisabeth Sobotka announced. Next year’s opera production at the indoor venue will be Rossini’s Tancredi. Directed by Jan Philipp Gloger, it will open on 18 July – one day after Weber’s Freischütz, which has long been lined up as the next lake stage opera. "Rossini put into this opera some of the loveliest music he ever wrote," Sobotka said, explaining her choice. The opera moreover shows a parallel with Ernani: "Tancredi also has an abstruse libretto which can’t be translated 1:1 onto the stage today."
As for the coming season, Sobotka is already satisfied with the figures: "We know at the close of summer we’ll have positive results." Though some tickets remain unsold, the management is confident about the end-of-year figures. This year a total of 215,000 tickets were put on sale – with around 200 seats fewer available in the 6,659-seat auditorium because of ongoing renovation work.
Away from the lake stage, the festival’s programme includes a production at the Workshop Theatre that puts diversity centre-stage. The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by the British-German composer Philip Venables will be given its first performance in Austria on 27 July. With a libretto written by the stage director, Ted Huffman, the piece explores gender and sexual diversity and is based on the eponymous novel by Larry Mitchell.
Another literary adaptation, in this case of a Bertolt Brecht play, is Die Judith von Shimoda by the Argentine composer Fabian Panisello. A co-production with Neue Oper Wien, the piece will be directed by Philipp M. Krenn and conducted by Walter Kobera. The premiere is on 17 August. As part of the 2023 Opera Studio, young singers will work on a new production of Jules Massenet’s Werther, which opens on 14 August. Deutsches Theater Berlin returns to Bregenz with a production of Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug), directed by Anne Lenk. The premiere is on 21 July.
The orchestral concert programme in 2023 has the theme “Approaches – Adaptations – Appropriations” and features music from the turn of the 20th century. The Vienna Symphony Orchestra will give three concerts (24 July, 30 July & 7 August) with works by Maurice Ravel, Jean Sibelius and Richard Strauss and including pieces by the little-known female composers Florence Price and Grażyna Bacewicz. In line with tradition a matinee concert by the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra closes the festival (20 August).
(APA/maf/luw)
