Bregenz Festival: A Month of Culture and Music
In July and August, the Bregenz Festival presents a wide variety of musical selections, including the first stage production of Giacomo Puccini's "Madame Butterfly".
The lake stage on Lake Constance is world-famous. / Picture: © Wikimedia Commons / Landespolizeikommando Vorarlberg [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
The undisputed highlight of the Austrian festival summer, alongside the Salzburg Festival, is the Bregenz Festival. This year, it offers numerous national but also international guests five weeks full of music and drama and aims to inspire its guests with a diverse musical programme.
The festival is known for the beauty of the natural backdrop of Lake Constance, oversized stage sets, technical cabinet tricks and unique acoustics achieved by the Bregenz directional hearing technique.
A special feature of the Bregenz Festival is its approximately 80 events, which aim to impress their audiences with spectacularly staged classics on the one hand, but also with rarely performed as well as experimental works. In addition, there are both small and large concerts every year.
This year, Giacomo Puccini's drama "Madame Butterfly" will be performed on the lake stage for the first time. The musical direction of this popular piece will be taken over by conductor Enrique Mazzola, who was also responsible for the Rigoletto production last year. Director Andreas Homoki, artistic director of the Zurich Opera House, brings with him an internationally successful team that conjures up Japanese flair on Lake Constance with delicate landscape paintings in Michael Levine's magical stage design.
For the performance of Giacomo Puccini's masterpiece, the lake stage is once again spectacularly transformed: a huge sheet of paper weighing 300 tonnes becomes the setting for the story with colourful costumes and enchanting paintings.
A love affair with a tragic ending is also on the programme at the Festspielhaus: In Umberto Giordano's "Siberia", the courtesan Stephana sacrifices her previous life to follow her great love Vassili into the Siberian penal camp. Effectively, with fascinating Russian sounds and an impressive chorus, Giordano portrays her unwavering struggle against the injustice of a hopeless situation.
With the world premiere of Brigitta Muntendorf and Moritz Lobeck's music theatre work "Melencolia" and the Austrian premiere of the opera "Captain Nemo's Library" by Johannes Kalitzke, staged with puppetry, there are also entirely new works on the programme.
This summer, two operas will be performed by young singers in the opera studio: Gioachino Rossini's "The Italian in Algiers" and Joseph Haydn's "Armida". Young musicians will also be able to show what they can do in the orchestral concerts - Andrés Orozco-Estrada, principal conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, will lead the newly established Bregenz Orchestra Academy.
Tickets for the Festival can be purchased at the organiser's website: https://bregenzerfestspiele.com/en