“When the Salzburg Festival in Austria was first held, in the summer of 1920, it consisted of just half a dozen performances of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s morality play ‘Jedermann’ (‘Everyman’),” writes Michael Cooper in Wednesday’s (11/13) New York Times. “Since then, the festival has grown into one of the grandest events on the world’s cultural calendar. It will celebrate its centennial next summer with more than 200 performances in 44 days of operas, symphonies, concerts and plays. Music with a local angle by Mozart (Salzburg’s favorite son) and Richard Strauss (one of the festival’s founders) will be featured, as will 20th-century modernists such as Luigi Nono and Morton Feldman.” Among the festival’s opera productions will be Strauss’s Elektra with the Vienna Philharmonic, led by Franz Welser-Möst, music director of the Cleveland Orchestra. “The festival’s house band, the Vienna Philharmonic, will be led by a group of first-rank maestros: Gustavo Dudamel, [Mariss] Jansons, Riccardo Muti, Andris Nelsons and Christian Thielemann. Visiting orchestras include the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla; the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, with Daniel Barenboim; the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, with Manfred Honeck; and the Berlin Philharmonic, led by its new chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko.”
Posted November 15, 2019
