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27 July – 31 August

Jürgen Flimm started his term as Artistic Director with rarities such as Joseph Haydn’s Armida directed by Christof Loy and Hector Berlioz’s opera about an artist, Benvenuto Cellini. Therefor, film director Philipp Stölzl exploited the Cinemascope stage of the Large Festival Hall to make the grand opéra ‘approach the feeling of great cinema’1 and interpreted it as an opulent stage show, while Valery Gergiev unleashed ‘a storm of sound’2.

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin also received its first performance at the Festival, directed by Andrea Breth and conducted by Daniel Barenboim. And Jan Fabre’s Requiem für eine Metamorphose/Requiem for a Metamorphosis took to the stage as a contemporary Dance of Death. Head of drama Thomas Oberender found a new venue in the Carabinieri Hall for Heiner Müller’s Quartett directed by Barbara Frey; and, after 20 years, another Thomas Bernhard was included in the repertoire: Ein Fest für Boris/A Party for Boris.

‘Continents’ conceived by head of concerts Markus Hinterhäuser started with a musical portrait of the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi; the series also included the world première of a scenic concert by Christoph Marthaler.

 

1 Frieder Reininghaus: Sammelsurium von Bildideen aus der Kino-Geschichte, in: Deutschlandfunk, 11 August 2007, https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sammelsurium-von-bildideen-aus-der-kino-geschichte.691.de.html?dram:article_id=50872

2 Klaus Kalchschmid: Wüster Kindergeburtstag, in: klassikinfo.de, 10 August 2007, https://www.klassikinfo.de/benvenuto-cellini-von-berlioz-in-salzburg/