Preview of the 2024 festival

Bregenz, 18.8.23. The iconic sheet of crumpled paper on the Bregenz shoreline will be history before very long. On Monday 21 August, the job of dismantling the Madame Butterfly stage set will begin. Not only that – the agenda also includes creating the basis for the lake stage production of Der Freischütz in 2024/25. The concrete core on which the stage sets are built is going to be entirely reconstructed to an altered plan and with modernised facilities. Also, new cables will be laid in the lake bed. You can read more about it here.

Remedy for nostalgia
Anybody wishing to preserve a piece of the magic of the Madame Butterfly production will have an opportunity to do so in autumn. On 13 and 14 October 2023 the Bregenz Festspielhaus will be selling off items belonging to the sets and costumes from this year’s festival. So if you’d really like to slip into Madame Butterfly’s shoes, or anything else, the costume and prop sale is the place for you! More details to follow.

Philipp Stölzl returns
Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz is one of the most popular operas in German-speaking countries and yet it has never been performed on the lake stage at Bregenz. This is set to change on 17 July 2024 when the Romantic opera, premiered in 1821, begins its first run at the summer festival. Tickets go on sale on 2 October 2023. Philipp Stölzl will direct the opera and design the set, while the music director will be the festival’s conductor in residence, Enrique Mazzola.

Opera at the Festspielhaus
The following day sees the premiere of Gioachino Rossini’s Tancredi, a suspenseful opera about love, trust and the impossibility of finding happiness in times of crisis. The Festspielhaus production will be directed by Jan Philipp Gloger. The music director will be Yi-Chen Lin, who Bregenz Festival audiences will remember for conducting Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.

Orchestral concerts
Symphonic masterpieces rub shoulders with new sound worlds to be discovered in the four orchestral concerts that give an illustration of the richness of music from the 19th century to the present day. With Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastorale, Robert Schumann’s “Rhenish” and Gustav Mahler’s 1st Symphony, three of the best loved symphonic works feature in the concert series, along with pieces by Carl Maria von Weber, Antonín Dvořák, Igor Stravinsky as well as Emilie Mayer, dubbed the “female Beethoven”, who enjoyed considerable success in the middle of the 19th century with her compositions. While conductor in residence Enrique Mazzola and Leo McFall, chief conductor of the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra, are familiar faces on the rostrum, Petr Popelka – the new chief conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra – and Giedrė Šlekytė will both be making their Bregenz debut in a performance of a new choral symphonic work by Thomas Larcher.

The 2024 Bregenz Festival runs from 17 July to 18 August. For more information please visit www.bregenzerfestspiele.com. Tickets are available from 2 October 2023.

(lk/red)