Unusually strong year at the Salzburg Festival
Once again it was the women who made this Salzburg season a real festival, at least as far as opera is concerned: women like the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian, who launched her world career four years ago with a brilliant interpretation of the title role of Richard Strauss’ Salome here in Salzburg began, and the nun in Giacomo Puccini’s one-act cycle “Il Trittico” ennobled three very different female characters with the full mellowness of her voice.
Unusual combinations, theatrical overrides
This vocal highlight also made it easy to get over the fact that the director Christof Loy, who is psychologically so finely drawn and otherwise always known for unusual interpretations, delivered rather high-quality ready-made goods with this “Il Trittico”.
It felt very different at the first opera premiere of this year’s festival season, when Italian director Romeo Castellucci scenically combined Béla Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” with Carl Orff’s apocalyptic oratorio opera “De Temporum Fine Comoedia”. He does not focus on Bluebeard, who otherwise easily mutates into a monster man, but on the woman, Judith, dramatically and brilliantly designed by Ausrine Stundyte.
Abysmal beautiful music and whipping rhythms
Castellucci installed her entering Bluebeard’s castle and unlocking the seven doors on the black stage of the Salzburg Felsenreitschule, lit only with a few fire symbols, as an overwhelming descent into the darkness of one’s own soul. Teodor Currentzis drove the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester through the abysmal beauty of Bartók’s music and the whipping rhythms of Orff’s “Spiel vom Ende der Zeiten” in such an impressive way that even stubborn critics fell silent. In the run-up to this Salzburg Festival, they had taken the Greek conductor, who was celebrated as a classical rebel and ostracized, in the crossfire because of the involvement of his MusicAeterna ensemble in Russian sponsorship.
But back to the women who gave Salzburg musical and scenic moments this year: Verdi’s “Aida” was one of them in the form of Elena Stikhina, who in the revised production and video installation by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, the woman as the great victim of various forms of war and occupation. And also Leoš Janáček’s “Káťa Kabanová”, with which Corinne Winters made her brilliant festival debut as a socially excluded person.
So while the opera at this year’s Salzburg Festival presented itself musically from its best side and also thematically descended into the seriousness of the world situation, the drama under its director Bettina Hering left no stone unturned in its four productions to show itself up to date .
Questioning human lostness
In fact, with a world premiere, two complete rewritings of classic material and an unusual combination of pieces, the program is worthy of a festival and clearly intended to give the theater new dramatic impetus.
The fact that not everything worked out just showed that failure can also be worthy of the festival. For example, the overwriting of the ten scenes of Arthur Schnitzler’s famous “Reigen” by ten well-known authors, staged by the Latvian-American director Yana Ross, was eagerly awaited. Ultimately, however, it turned out to be just as overambitious as the transfer of the sacrificial myth of Iphigenia from Euripides and Goethe to the present, which the Polish director Ewelina Marciniak together with the playwright Joanna Bednarczyk placed in the educated middle class of today.
Ivo van Hove’s interweaving of Marieluise Fleißer’s “Purgatory in Ingolstadt” and “Pioneers in Ingolstadt” resists with a scenic as well as dramatic force, resulting in a gloomy look into the maltreated soul of a young generation. What remains is the world premiere of the first play by the exceptional director Thorsten Lensing entitled “Verrückt nach Trost”, which turned out to be a floating, surreal questioning of human loneliness and at the same time was one thing above all with Sebastian Blomberg, Devid Striesow, Ursina Lardi and André Jung: one Actors’ festival and thus festival happiness!