Opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi,
Libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, in Italian
language with German surtitles.

Giuseppe Verdi¡¯s monumental opera Aida follows on from Puccini¡¯s passionate Tosca as the opera on the Floating Stage in the summer of 2010 and 2010. The story of the tragic love affair between the Ethiopian princess Aida ¨C brought to the Nile as a slave ¨C and the Egyptian commander Radames was enthusiastically acclaimed at its premiere in Cairo in 1871, with Aida subsequently becoming one of the most popular and most performed works in the opera repertoire.

Grand passion, tragic conflict

As the Festival¡¯s artistic director David Pountney explains, there were compelling reasons for deciding to mount another opera by Giuseppe Verdi on the Floating Stage after Puccini¡¯s Tosca. ¡°It is quite simply a marvellous place for everything that Giuseppe Verdi did best: transforming grand passion and tragic conflict into superb music. But Aida is also a very modern parable about nationalism, belligerence and hatred of the enemy, which shows that in war there can only be losers.¡±

DATES: TBA

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Premiere on 21 July 2009 - 7.30 p.m., Festival Opera House

Opera by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, libretto by Alexander Medwedew based on Zofia Posmysz‘s novella with the same title. Sung in German and Russian with German surtitles.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s opera The Passenger/Die Passagierin will be staged at the Festival Opera House in 2010. This opera by the Polish composer is based on a novel with the same title by the Polish Holocaust survivor Zofia Posmysz. Completed in 1968, the opera was first performed in 2006 in a semi-staged concert in Moscow.

The Passenger is set partly on an ocean liner en route from Europe to South America in the late 1950s, and partly in the concentration camp Auschwitz in 1943 and 1944. One of the passengers on board is Lisa, the wife of a German diplomat who is on his way to Brazil in order to take up a new post. It turns out that Lisa was formerly an SS warden in Auschwitz. To her horror one of her fellow passengers is the spitting image of Marta, a Polish prisoner at the camp whom Lisa had tried to befriend while she was a warden there.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who was born into Jewish family in Warsaw in 1919 and died in Moscow in 1996, is regarded as the most independent-minded and important of all of Shostakovich’s followers. In 1939 he fled from the Nazis from Warsaw to Minsk; his parents and his sister were killed. In 1943 Weinberg moved to Moscow, where he worked as a composer and pianist, completing a vast quantity of music including scores for some of the Soviet Union’s most famous films and beloved children’s cartoons.

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ORCHESTRAL CONCERTS

Holding the baton at the concerts of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra this summer will be the British conductor Paul Daniel, his Omsk-born colleague Kirill Petrenko and the German Markus Stenz.

Daniel and Petrenko both appeared at the festival in 2007, the former conducting the acclaimed production of Benjamin Britten¡¯s opera Death in Venice at the Festival Opera House, and the latter responsible for a no less warmly received orchestral concert with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.

Their new associate this year is the conductor Markus Stenz, who graduated from the Musikhochschule in Cologne and also studied under Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa at Tanglewood. Today he conducts the G¨¹rzenich Orchestra in Cologne.

In the coming season the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra can be heard not only at its traditional matinee concert but also at an entirely new event: a late night concert in the open air on the plaza in front of the Festival Opera House, when the regional orchestra will play a selection of pieces perfectly suited to the atmosphere of a warm summer night.

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Vienna Symphony Orchestra

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