Münchner Opernfestspiele, 25 June – 31 July
One of the oldest celebrations of musical theatre, the Munich Opera Festival dates back 130 years; this year's programme features thirty different opera productions - a showcase of the best works staged at the Munich Opera during the recent theatre seasons (featuring casts reinforced by some of the world's greatest musical talents) as well as a number of premieres, the new productions being staged especially for the Munich Festival.
The highlight of this year's Munich Festival is Olivier Messiaen's mystery of faith, his Saint François d'Assise opera; the production of the four-hour piece was commissioned by the organisers from the Viennese orgiastic action artist Hermann Nitsch; the place on the podium is taken by Kent Nagano. Having originally discovered the sensual power of language through the Bible, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Kleist, Trakl and Homer - a sensuality intensified to the point of violence and horror when one really gets to exploring the depths of the human nature - Nitsch worked with the potential of language until one day he asked himself: Why overload language with the symbols of sensual experience that are words? Why not help people come to terms with the experience directly - through images, smell and taste? Instead of words, the guests invited to Hermann Nitsch's Orgiastic Mystery Theatre are confronted with fresh blood, slaughtered animals and their entrails, mountains of grapes and tomatoes, rituals, sacrificing, ecstasy, wine and feasts.
The programme of the Munich Festival presents a selection of interesting Bavarian State Opera productions dating from previous seasons featuring excellent musical forces: Peter Konwitschny's Tristan und Isolde conducted by Kent Nagano and starring the great Swedish singer Nina Stemme as Isolde; the radical Catalan director Calixto Bieito's reading of Beethoven's Fidelio with Jonas Kaufmann, one of the world's most brilliant tenors, as Florestan, as well as the Austrian director Martin Kušej's take on Dvořák's Rusalka, explored through the lens of the complexity of the modern human psyche: the Latvian soprano Kristīne Opolais' debut in the title role earlier in the season brought her great affection from the Munich opera-goers.
Alongside the festival's more ambitious productions, the considerably smaller Pavillion 21 venue (also boasting the considerably lower admission fee of EUR 8) hosts performances of a number of new opera works and experimental productions. It is here that the world premiere of the Czech composer Miroslav Srnka's Make No Noise chamber opera will be held. Pavillion 21 will also feature the Encyclopédie of sounds and melodies by François Sarhan, a production running for several seasons to great acclaim. Another piece worthy of special attention is Undankbare Biester, a chamber opera created by the Hungarian director Árpád Schilling, the founder of the internationally acclaimed Krétakör theatre ensemble, the composer Marcell Dargay and a team of musicians and singers. Admittedly, tickets to this three-hour performance, also running at Pavillion 21, belong to a different price-range altogether.
Programme: www.muenchner-opern-festspiele.de
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