Salzburg 2011: Easter and Summer Festival

As we all know the Salzburg Festival celebrated its 90th anniversary this year. But besides the Summer Festival, Salzburg also hosts the Easter Festival [initiated by Herbert von Karajan (not fave) in 1967], and so every year you may hop to Salzburg for your Easter holidays and enjoy a series of concerts and one new opera production. There is a snag however: the seats are prohibitively expensive, but since the shows are co-produced with regular opera houses you can opt for a more affordable solution and see the same production at co-producer's.

Last year the Paris Opera was a co-producer and so we could see a hideous production of Niccolo Giommelli's opera Demofoonte [dir. Cesare Lievi, cond. Riccardo Muti] at Palais Garnier.
This year the opera production was Die Götterdämmerung [dir. Stéphane Braunschweig, cond. Simon Rattle] which was premiered at the Festival in Aix-en-Provence 2009, and was pretty awful too.

To break the spell of awful productions the organizers decided to engage Stefan Herheim and Heike Scheele (who else?!) and propose in 2011 a new production of Salomé -- with Berliner Philharmoniker and Sir Simon Rattle, and the cast: Emily Magee, Iain Paterson, Pavol Breslik, Stig Andersen, Hanna Schwarz. Two shows are scheduled for April 16 and 25 2011.

I heard that two other opera houses co-produce the show, one of which is supposedly Semperoper Dresden. If anyone knows more about this, please do share it with us...

As for the Summer Festival 2011...

• (1,2,3) Rerun of 3 Mozart/DaPonte operas produced by Claus Guth, but the major attractor should be Marc Minkowski who will conduct one opera (the other conductors will be Robin Ticciati and Yannick Nézet-Séguin) -- reference

• (4) NEW PRODUCTION: Macbeth (G. Verdi), directed by Peter Stein and with Riccardo Muti conducting (Aaaaach!)

• (5) NEW PRODUCTION: Die Frau ohne Schatten (R. Strauss), directed by Christof Loy and conducted by Christian Thielemann [cast: Evelyn Herlitzius, Anne Schwanewilms, Stephen Gould (I so doubt it...), and Wolfgang Koch]

• (6) NEW PRODUCTION: The Makropulos Affair/Věc Makropulos (L. Janáček), directed by Christoph Marthaler and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen

• (7) An opera by Luigi Nono -- reference