The Grand Salzburg Lodge | Salzburg Pageant Overview – Il viaggio a Reims

For many who have been paying consideration, the information from Salzburg of late has been dire. Markus Hinterhäuser, the Salzburg Pageant’s inventive director since 2016, was faraway from lively management in March after a protracted battle with the competition’s supervisory board. In 2024, his contract had been prolonged by 2031. There had been reported tensions between Hinterhäuser and the board — together with over the abstract firing of the competition’s chief of drama, Marina Davydova, in 2024, only a yr into her mandate — however the Austrian pianist and impresario appeared to benefit from the help of highly effective allies who believed in him and his imaginative and prescient.

Earlier this yr, nonetheless, the board argued that Hinterhäuser had violated a “Wohlverhaltensklausel,” or good-conduct clause, connected to his contract renewal. A competition that want to confine the drama to the stage, ideally in Lorenzo da Ponte’s witty rhyming couplets or some gorgeously upholstered Hofmannsthalian idiom, immediately discovered itself coping with an institutional disaster as a complete renovation, reorganization, and enlargement of the competition district — whose public funding was initially put at roughly €262 million, with later studies citing a determine nearer to €400 million — kicks into excessive gear. (The undertaking would require the Großes Festspielhaus, Salzburg’s largest venue, to shut for roughly two years.) Extra instantly, Hinterhäuser’s dismissal left the competition scrambling to search out somebody to steer a summer time season conceived by the just-departed intendant.

Nor was the spring particularly gentle onstage on this Alpine idyll. The Berlin Philharmonic made its long-awaited return to the Salzburg Easter Pageant — a separate group from the Salzburg Pageant — for the beginning of a brand new Ring cycle underneath Kirill Petrenko. Director Kirill Serebrennikov’s Rheingold supplied spectacle, ambition, and loads of darkness. Petrenko and the Berliners gave a efficiency whose readability and authority appeared, at almost each flip, contradicted by a dreary staging that was much less a manufacturing than a cluttered spectacle of projections, ethnographic masks, and rituals.

A change in temperature lastly arrived, mercifully, final weekend with Barrie Kosky’s gleefully anarchic tackle Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims, which headlined the Salzburg Whitsun Pageant and returns in August for 5 performances. The manufacturing was, after all, deliberate lengthy earlier than the Hinterhäuser disaster reached its fruition. Nonetheless, theater takes on shade from the situations by which it seems, and this Viaggio arrived as a launch: actual, trendy, light-footed and much more disciplined than its floor gaiety at first recommended.

Picture: Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg Pageant

Rossini’s 1825 opera is about at a spa resort the place a gaggle of European vacationers has been delayed on the best way to the coronation of Charles X. Kosky swaps out the royal ceremony for the numerous birthday of a really particular somebody referred to within the frivolously adjusted libretto as “La Ceci.” Although programmed lengthy earlier than the Pageant’s present difficulties, this work about elegant individuals stranded earlier than an official ceremony might hardly keep away from buying a sure resonance in a metropolis the place the cultural equipment has lately regarded much less easy than its picture suggests. Salzburg might hardly have requested for a extra elegant mirror, or a much less solemn one.

For a lot of the Hinterhäuser period, solemnity got here naturally. His first season, in 2017, set the tone with Berg’s Wozzeck, Shostakovich’s Woman Macbeth of Mtsensk, and Reimann’s Lear. It was an formidable program that confirmed little curiosity within the competition’s extra comfy self-image as a shrine to Mozart and Strauss. Hinterhäuser’s competition usually returned to ethical extremity, metaphysical inquiry, and psychological seriousness.

At its finest, that strategy produced inventive triumphs. Peter Sellars’s La clemenza di Tito, additionally in 2017, made late Mozart really feel each ritualized and current. Warlikowski’s Elektra and Macbeth equipped large-scale, disturbing stage structure. Simon Stone’s grand and shattering The Greek Ardour gave the 2023 competition one of many interval’s clearest successes. Kosky’s personal Káťa Kabanová, in 2022, confirmed how extreme and economical means might nonetheless produce emotional immediacy: on the immense stage of the Felsenreitschule, Janáček’s heroine stood remoted earlier than a crowd of figures whose turned backs literalized her profound isolation and society’s indifference.

However Hinterhäuser’s methodology additionally had its limits. The Pageant turned excellent at presenting ordeals on levels that regarded alternately like tribunals, laboratories, bunkers, and clinics; one might admire the intelligence and nonetheless miss the pleasure. Comedy, particularly, was unreliable. Kosky’s Orphée aux enfers in 2019 and Rolando Villazón’s Il barbiere di Siviglia in 2022 have been joyous exceptions: colorfully comedian evenings that took silliness critically. Christoph Marthaler’s tedious Falstaff and Martin Kušej’s menacing Le nozze di Figaro, each from 2023, confirmed how simply the comedian impulse might curdle into one thing formalistic, airless, or each.

Kat’a Kabanova on the Salzburg Pageant in 2022 / Picture: Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg Pageant

The approaching summer time nonetheless bears Hinterhäuser’s imprint. Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, in a brand new Romeo Castellucci manufacturing on the Felsenreitschule, appears to be like again unmistakably to the Mortier years, when Sellars’s 1992 staging of the identical work helped open Salzburg as much as avant-garde music and drama. Castellucci is arguably essentially the most vital director Hinterhäuser invited to work at Salzburg, beginning with Salome (2018) and persevering with with Don Giovanni (2021) and Bluebeard’s Fort / De temporum high-quality comoedia (2022).

The competition’s new Carmen unites the 2 arguably largest musical stars of the Hinterhäuser years, the Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian, making her debut within the title position, and the Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis. Approaching Gabriela Carrizo, the Argentinian inventive director of Peeping Tom, a Belgian dance theater troupe, to direct and choreograph this operatic warhorse seems like a quintessentially Hinterhäuserian gamble. At its worst, the egos concerned might wind up reinforcing one another’s worst instincts. At its finest, the encounter might end in a genuinely new and illuminating approach of viewing a perennial favourite.

For the previous decade and a half, the Whitsun Pageant has represented one other mannequin within the identical establishment. Cecilia Bartoli has directed it since 2012, and her contract runs till 2031. In that point, she has labored alongside Alexander Pereira, Sven-Eric Bechtolf, Hinterhäuser, and now Karin Bergmann, the interim Inventive Director of the summer time competition. Maybe greater than anybody else in Salzburg’s latest historical past, Bartoli has been a beacon of stability. Below her management, the principle Whitsun opera – which Bartoli additionally performs in – has dependably returned through the summer time Pageant, making Whitsun really feel much less like a festive appendage than a workshop whose fully-staged productions feed into the principle season.

Handel, Bellini, Rossini, Gluck, Bernstein, Mozart and Vivaldi have all discovered their approach into Bartoli’s Whitsun repertory. The outcomes haven’t all the time been equal, however the id is evident: programmatic focus, scholarly curiosity, and sufficient widespread enchantment to present the weekend its personal distinct, and distinctly festive, character.

Cecilia Bartoli in Ariodante on the 2017 Salzburg Pageant / Picture: Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg Pageant

Kosky belongs to each Salzburgs. On the summer time competition, his Orphée aux enfers (2019) was a managed explosion of Offenbachian subversiveness. His Káťa Kabanová was restrained, grave and devastating. Lodge Metamorphosis, his Vivaldi-Ovid pasticcio for Whitsun in 2025, handled a transitory area generally related to journey and leisure as a web site of profound bodily and religious transformation. A yr later, Il viaggio a Reims felt very very like its comedian counterpart, a satyr play, with the bellboy-stuffed setting – name it the Grand Salzburg Lodge – entrapping its eccentric inhabitants lengthy sufficient for the director to showcase their most outlandish and flamboyant options.

In an official competition interview, Kosky calls Rossini’s opera “fantastic nonsense,” but he treats that nonsense with the utmost respect. Rossini wrote Viaggio for the coronation festivities of Charles X; it was his first opera for Paris and his final in Italian. The rating later disappeared from the repertory till its reconstruction within the late twentieth century. Its dramatic premise is wafer skinny, but Rossini builds a complicated and diverse rating of abundance round it: virtuosic arias and firecracker ensembles that inhabit quite a lot of emotional and patriotic moods. Underplotted and overpopulated, the opera has not a lot a plot as a state of affairs. The visitors don’t attain Reims; as a substitute, their delay turns into the motion.

Kosky’s manufacturing understands that the opera’s obvious shapelessness — social rituals hold promising order, then lead nowhere – requires not rationalization, however rhythm. The piece has an odd kinship with Buñuel’s unresolved bourgeois quests in The Discreet Allure of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty. Kosky provides to this a Lubitschian finesse, particularly within the choreography of elevators and revolving doorways that lure or discharge passengers and within the scampering of visitors and domestics from one resort room to a different.

Kosky maintains that comedy is tougher to direct than Wagner warhorses as a result of the previous is dependent upon “timing, timing, timing.” Entrances, collapses, turns, reactions and pauses are deliberate and executed with musical accuracy. The performing is uniformly sturdy, not merely busy however actual. In a piece this episodic, with so many characters and so many alternatives for extra, that readability is a formidable achievement.

Additionally it is plainly the work of a artistic workforce that has internalized the director’s type intimately and is aware of ship. Rufus Didwiszus’s set is just not an ornamental resort however a construction for comedian motion. His work on Káťa Kabanová used rows of life-size figures to make social strain seen; right here, area is extra cellular and porous. The resort doesn’t a lot home the comedy as generate it. Corridors, doorways and public areas hold producing the incorrect encounters on the proper moments.

Victoria Behr’s extravagant (Oscar, Tony, or Met Gala-worthy) costumes are among the many night’s chief pleasures. They offer every visitor a social id and temperament to match the libretto and the music: aristocratic self-regard, skilled vainness, nationwide satisfaction, erotic readiness, comedian insecurity. Franck Evin’s lighting retains the stage readable even when it’s crowded. The resort might be brilliant, conspiratorial, public, or intimate because the scene requires, and the lighting helps hold the comedy aligned with the music.

Otto Pichler’s choreography offers the manufacturing a lot of its snap. Pichler has been Kosky’s associate in crime on Ball im Savoy, La Belle Hélène, West Facet Story, The Bassarids, and Fiddler on the Roof, amongst many others. He all the time finds the visible rhythms to enhance the rating and Kosky’s type of directing. Right here, Pichler ensures that the resort visitors, dancers and servants all transfer as if Rossini’s coloratura runs have entered their our bodies.

The efficiency from the pit was brilliant, agile and flamable: Rossini with chunk, not merely whipped cream. Gianluca Capuano and the interval ensemble Les Musiciens du Prince – Monaco, who’ve paced most of Bartoli’s Whitsun operatic outings since 2017, have been notably expert at making the ensembles, together with the well-known Gran Pezzo Concertato, with its lengthy a cappella ensemble, construct with an exhilarating sense of inevitability. The historic devices lent the music a pointy edge.

Picture: Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg Pageant

Rossini wrote Viaggio for an organization of virtuosi — it has ten main, demanding roles — and the Salzburg solid equipped each the vocal end and comedian nerve required. Bartoli, because the poetess Corinna, had comparatively little stage time, however she made it rely. The music that Rossini offers her doesn’t depend upon torrents of coloratura, however moderately poise, sensitivity to textual content and a shapely line. Bartoli equipped all three and graciously ceded the stage to her quite a few, extremely completed co-stars.

That ensemble had no weak hyperlinks: Marina Viotti’s darkly coloured Melibea and Dmitry Korchak’s ardent, jealous Libenskof gave the night its strongest romantic cost, whereas Tara Erraught made Madama Cortese, the resort’s proprietress, a brilliant and shrewd comedian nerve middle. Edgardo Rocha introduced a chic ease to the useless French officer Belfiore; Florian Sempey gave Don Profondo’s catalogue aria verbal chunk and theatrical swagger; and Misha Kiria’s Trombonok, the gang’s preposterous German music lover, equipped the encircling frenzy with a agency comedian bass line. Mélissa Petit’s Contessa di Folleville made the presumed lack of her hat — and what a hat it was! — seem to be a first-class tragedy. Ildebrando D’Arcangelo, as Lord Sidney, was particularly deft at being daft, his comedian method dry and unexpectedly nimble, with out the pressure that usually afflicts singers requested to be humorous. On the finish of the efficiency, Bartoli popped out of a birthday cake, not as Corinna, however moderately as La Ceci, the birthday lady.

For Kosky, this Viaggio seems like a break from the intense and sometimes darkish repertoire he has busied himself with this season, Woman Macbeth of Mtsensk, Siegfried and the upcoming Die Frau ohne Schatten. Nonetheless, comedy of this sort is just not a trip from seriousness, however moderately a unique show of prowess.

That’s the reason the manufacturing feels so welcome in Salzburg now. After the management drama and earlier than a summer time program nonetheless formed by the absent Hinterhäuser’s urge for food for scale and issue, Il viaggio a Reims restored one thing Salzburg has not all the time dealt with simply in recent times: subtle pleasure.