Holland Festival, 1 – 23 June
Launched in 1947, the Holland Festival is among the oldest European performing arts forums. The self-definition it provides is simple and terse: the Holland Festival is the best operas, dance and musical productions featuring the world's best performers. The festival programme comprises both world premieres of works created specially for the Holland Festival and powerful performing arts events "road-tested" elsewhere,
This year's Holland Festival sees the world premiere of A Dog's Heart, an opera by the Russian composer Alexander Raskatov, based on an identically titled story by Mikhail Bulgakov; the production was staged by one of the most exciting British avant-garde directors Simon McBurney.
The French director Olivier Py makes his debut at the Holland Festival with a production of Benjamin Britten's Curlew River opera; this staging of one of the 20th-century most powerful religious musical dramas, a Christian parable developed from a Japanese Noh theatre play, was originally created for the Edinburgh Festival to be transferred later to Opéra National de Lyon - the opera company behind the forthcoming performances at the festival. Olivier Py loves the theatre in all its diversity; his works feature the wildest genre fusions: cabaret and vaudeville rub shoulders with tragedy and the political, philosophical and mythological material forms new conceptual interconnections. In his production of Curlew River, Olivier Py takes the spectator to a world of deep suffering and divine illumination. The festival organisers cite this work as a profound artistic experience.
The Holland Festival offers an opportunity to see two productions of the transcontinental Bridge Project by the London Old Vic and New York Brooklyn Academy of Music. The idea behind the Bridge Project was staging some of the world's greatest plays to show the productions featuring great contemporary actors on both sides of the Atlantic. Both productions - Shakespeare's As You Like It and Tempest - were directed by the British filmmaker Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition).
The festival programme includes a real Dostoyevsky marathon - I Demoni, an eleven and half-hour production of Demons, the creation of the legendary German director Peter Stein and actors of the Tieffe Teatro Milano company; the production which was born at the director's Italian country estate. The critics - who have been quite harsh about Stein's work for years - have hailed I Demoni as a new page in the director's career.
The Holland Festival also provides a rare opportunity to see the Latvian director Alvis Hermanis' production of Shukshin's Stories at the Moscow State Theatre of Nations. Another production well worth catching is the South African director William Kentridge's video animation performance Telegrams from the Nose which refers back to the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the Russian avant-garde era of great expectations, the time when Dmitry Shostakovich wrote his Nose opera based on the story by Nikolai Gogol and a whole generation of artists and musicians was wiped out by the Stalin regime.
Alongside the main programme and throughout June, the festival also features a string of free-admission events, including Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980), a thirty-year old electronic piece written by the British composer Jonathan Harvey - a study of the sounds of the great bell of Winchester Cathedral, accompanied by the cathedral choir. The Visual Kitchen video-collective from Brussels has transformed this classical piece of electronic music into a contemporary spatial experience, inviting the spectator/listener into a universe of sound and images.
Programme : www.hollandfestival.nl
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