Wiener Festwochen, May 14 – June 21
The Vienna Festival is one of the oldest, largest and finest international theater and music festivals in Europe. Ever since 1951, and during the most beautiful time of the year (in May and June, Vienna is abloom in roses), this festival reminds us that Vienna is the capital of first-rate art. Operas, concerts, exhibitions, theater productions and poetry readings – all featuring the world's leading talents – take place every evening in various venues around the city.
The Vienna Festival program offers an extremely diverse array of formats, from classic stage plays and huge opera productions to theatrically structured walks around the city and short, powerful pieces of performance art. Participants range from legendary directors and stage troupes, to just-recently discovered creative talents. This year's program contains 39 performances from 20 different countries.
After a lengthy absence from the international stage, Yevgeny Grishkovets – theatrical storyteller and author of subtle humanistic intonations of the kind rarely seen in today's theater – will be performing at the Vienna Festival. Grishkovets is heading to Vienna from Moscow with his latest production, “Farewell, Paper”. In our ultramodern digital age, Grishkovets returns to the writing desk and to text that has been written on paper, by hand – letters, postcards, long-hand notes. Grishkovets' humanistic journey goes back to a time when every other gesture and word directed at another person contained the individual and unique imprint of its deliverer.
An unusual artistic event that the festival's organizers themselves are calling “a quiet sensation” is the collaboration between conductor Kent Nagano and German stage director Andrea Breth on a 20th-century masterpiece – Bela Bartok's opera, “Bluebeard's Castle”. The event will be a double performance, as Robert Schumann's last piano composition, “Ghost Variations”, will also be heard, ensuring the public a poetically merciless journey into the bottomless depths of the human psyche.
Another event one shouldn't let pass by is the play “Go Down, Moses!”, a variation on Old Testament themes written by the metaphysical theater adept Romeo Castellucci. When asked about what was it about the ancient texts that drew his interest, Castellucci replied that it was the fragility of man – the weakness and feebleness of man as opposed to the enigma and power that is God. The Old Testament, says Castellucci, is a book that tells of horrible deeds, but it also tells of extreme humaneness. What is this assignment that has been given to Moses – to take his people to the Promised Land? And how is he supposed to do it? Moses' life journey – begun on the banks of the Nile, and including everything up to the miracle of the burning bush and the incident of the golden calf – is the substance from which this production has been created.
One of the Vienna Festival's frequent guests is the Croatian director Bobo Jelčić. Even though the festival's team of artistic directors has turned over three times already, their interest in Jelčić's works has not diminished. This summer Jelčić is participating with his stage production of Anton Chekov's “The Seagull”, with the play's setting and plot – a discussion about the fragile and quickly diminishing sources of creative ability, and the power of routine – having been transported to modern-day Zagreb. www.festwochen.at
Image: Farewell, Paper. Photo: Viktor Dmitrev
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