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    Asmik Grigorian Brings “A Diva Is Born” to the Salzburg Festival

    Asmik Grigorian will return to the role of Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s “Macbeth” and present her pop-infused comic recital “A Diva Is Born.”When the soprano Asmik Grigorian took on the title role of Strauss’s “Salome” at the Salzburg Festival, in 2018, the summer event found a new reigning diva.With a voice of lush power and a raw authenticity that shines through in every character, the Lithuanian artist has become one of today’s most sought operatic performers, in Vienna, currently her home city; London; Milan; and beyond.But she has flouted conventions of stardom and challenged audiences’ expectations. Onstage, she pushes well-known characters to dramatic extremes; offstage, she often stares into the camera with a defiantly non-glamorous expression.In August, she will return to Salzburg as Lady Macbeth in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s staging of Verdi’s “Macbeth,” first seen there in 2023. And on Aug. 24, with the pianist Hyung-ki Joo, she will present the comic recital “A Diva Is Born.”The “Diva” show debuted in May of last year at the Vienna State Opera — where it will return this December — and was recently performed in Vilnius, Lithuania, where Grigorian was born and raised.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Opera Companies Find Savings and Gains Through Collaborations

    Co-productions can help companies across the globe save money, collaborate artistically and ensure that lesser-known works are seen by more audiences.Simon McBurney’s acclaimed production of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina,” which debuted last month at the Salzburg Easter Festival ahead of its Metropolitan Opera premiere, almost didn’t happen.McBurney’s staging, once envisioned as a co-production between the Met and the Bolshoi in Moscow, was in limbo after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response to the war, the New York company severed ties with all Russian state-run institutions.At that time, Nikolaus Bachler had recently taken over as artistic director of the Easter Festival and was looking for other companies to share productions with. One of his ambitions was to present McBurney’s “Khovanshchina” in Salzburg. The Met signed on as co-producer. “For me, it was crucial to find partners from the very beginning,” he said in an interview last month at his office in Salzburg’s picturesque Altstadt, or Old City, shortly before the second and final performance of “Khovanshchina” at the festival, on April 21.“Especially for a festival like ours, it is such a pity — they did this in the past — that you do a production for two times and then it’s over,” he said. “This is an artistic waste and economic waste.”A scene from John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra” at the Met, a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona.Karen Almond/Met OperaIn recent years, the Met has increasingly turned to co-producing not only to share costs, but also as a way to collaborate artistically with other companies. The final premiere of the current season, John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is a co-production with San Francisco Opera and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” a Met commission composed by Mason Bates that adapts Michael Chabon’s novel, will open the 2025-26 season and is a collaboration with the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where it premiered in November. Two further premieres in the new season, “La Sonnambula” and Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” are shared among various opera companies in Europe and the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    5 Breakout Artists at the Salzburg Festival

    The Salzburg Festival is synonymous with excellence and fame. But it’s also a place where artists on the cusp of stardom can shine.The Salzburg Festival has, since its founding more than 100 years ago, been known as a gathering place for the world’s finest musicians.That’s still true: During a visit there earlier this month, I heard Grigory Sokolov play Bach with unfussy authority; Jordi Savall lead his period orchestra in magisterial accounts of Beethoven’s final two symphonies; Igor Levit muscle through another Beethoven symphony, the bacchic Seventh, with just a piano.But Salzburg is also a proving ground for artists on the cusp on stardom. The soprano Asmik Grigorian, for example, was busy but hardly world famous until she gave a career-making performance as Salome there in 2018.This year, there were breakthroughs to be found throughout Salzburg’s theaters. If you looked past the top billing, past the Cecilia Bartolis and Teodor Currentzises, they were even at some of the most high-profile events this summer. Here are five of them.Lukas SternathThe pianist Lukas Sternath performing with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, under the conductor Adam Fischer.Marco Borrelli/Salzburg FestivalIn a bit of scheduling serendipity, Levit’s recital took place during the same weekend that the Austrian pianist Lukas Sternath, his former student, was debuting with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg. It was touching to see Levit in the balcony of the Mozarteum’s ornate Grosser Saal, looking down as Sternath eloquently performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor (K. 466) under the baton of Adam Fischer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Has the Composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Time Finally Come?

    With an opera at the Salzburg Festival and recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, the music of Mieczyslaw Weinberg may be taking root.It’s difficult to define a comeback in classical music. A neglected composer may be championed by the artists of one generation only to be ignored by the next, or resurface during an anniversary only to return underground.Take the works of Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-96), a Polish-born composer who found refuge in Soviet Russia, but whose reputation in the West is largely overshadowed by that of his good friend Dmitri Shostakovich. There has been increasing interest in Weinberg this century, and there are signs that his music is finally taking root in the repertoire.The latest milestone is an excellent revival of his opera “The Idiot” at the high-profile Salzburg Festival in Austria under the baton of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, a conductor with a Deutsche Grammophon contract who has, with scholarly authority, brought Weinberg’s works to something like the mainstream.Still, as a figure in music history he remains mostly unknown to modern listeners: a Jewish composer who wrote with unwavering beauty and peace in the face of some of the 20th century’s worst atrocities; whose identity and experiences suffused more than 150 works, as well as dozens of soundtracks that await attention and interpretation; who, under no outside pressure, according to his family, converted to Christianity at the end of his life.Weinberg was born in Warsaw but fled in 1939, after hearing on the radio that a German invasion of the city was imminent. (He traveled alone; it wasn’t until the 1960s that he learned his family had been murdered in a concentration camp.) He went to the Soviet border, and settled in Minsk. Nearly two years later, he left there as the Nazis pushed eastward, joining the wartime refugee community in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.He ultimately made it to Moscow, with the help of composers including Shostakovich, who had secured an invitation for Weinberg from the State Committee on the Arts. He enjoyed some modest prosperity and rising prominence, but a Stalinist crackdown on music, combined with institutionalized antisemitism, led to his arrest in early 1953.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    As Ukraine War Goes On, Where Is Teodor Currentzis’s Red Line?

    Teodor Currentzis, whose MusicAeterna receives funding from a Russian state bank, has eluded censure at the prestigious Salzburg Festival.When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the classical music world’s reaction was swift. Artists with ties to President Vladimir V. Putin, or those who had publicly supported his war efforts, were dropped by orchestras and opera houses across the West.One person who seemed to elude such punishment, though, was Teodor Currentzis, who is leading concerts and a production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the prestigious Salzburg Festival in Austria. More than two years into the war, his continued presence there is frustrating to many, raising uncomfortable questions about what is acceptable in service of music.Currentzis, who was born in Greece, was given Russian citizenship by Putin’s government in 2014, the year Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula. Two decades ago, he founded MusicAeterna, a small musical empire that started as an orchestra and now includes a choir and dance company in St. Petersburg.MusicAeterna doesn’t have any direct affiliation with Putin, but it came under scrutiny after the 2022 invasion because of support from the state-controlled VTB Bank (which has been penalized by the United States), as well as other government-related donors. Currentzis has been silent about the war, neither denouncing Russia nor supporting Ukraine.And he has lost some work as a result. Earlier this year, the Wiener Festwochen in Austria canceled an appearance by him and the German SWR Symphony Orchestra after fierce criticism from the Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv, who appeared at the same festival with Ukrainian musicians.Salzburg has stood by Currentzis but not by his Russian musicians. The “Don Giovanni” here is a revival of a production that originated in 2021, with him conducting. Then, the pit ensemble was MusicAeterna. Now it’s Utopia, the all-star group, in the spirit of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, that he started in 2022; pointedly, it is based in Western Europe.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    At 97, This Conductor Is Modest and Extraordinary

    When Herbert Blomstedt, the oldest major conductor active today, led the Vienna Philharmonic, age was only one factor in his remarkable artistry.If you’ve been reading news about the U.S. presidential election, you might be forgiven for thinking that age has something to do with ability.But it doesn’t work that way in classical music, a field in which artists often go on as long as they can. Conductors tend to retire only when they decide it’s time. And Herbert Blomstedt, who recently turned 97, clearly doesn’t want to just yet.The oldest major conductor still keeping a regular performance schedule, he was forced to take a break after a fall in December, but was back onstage by the spring and, this week, conducted the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. Hardly pushed aside because of his age, he was at the podium of one of the world’s greatest orchestras, at one of classical music’s most prestigious events.Blomstedt has garnered a lot of attention for his longevity and vitality, but that is just one aspect of what makes him a remarkable conductor. As the critic Alex Ross wrote when Blomstedt was 94, equating age with wisdom is a dubious belief, and what he enjoys now is “a belated reward for a resolutely unshowy musician who has gone about his business decade after decade.”Even Blomstedt doesn’t spend too much time making sense of his age in interviews. He values routine, and cooks for himself when he’s not on the road. And he has mentioned that, as a Seventh-day Adventist, he doesn’t eat meat or drink alcohol or coffee; without missing a beat, though, he often adds that Winston Churchill made it to 90 liberally drinking and smoking cigars.Wisdom may not be a given with Blomstedt’s age, but it’s undeniable in his artistry. Perhaps because of physical limitations or personal preferences, or both, his conducting in recent years has had the kind of economy that comes with experience. (You can hear it, too, on the recordings he continues to release, with ensembles including the Philharmonic and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.) He is also a maestro with roots in musicology, who thrills at returning to scores; he has mentioned that it took 66 years to notice a detail in Schubert’s “Great” Symphony for the first time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Salzburg Festival Tradition Deserves a Wider Audience

    Robert Carsen’s take on “Jedermann,” a play staged at the festival every year, stands head and shoulders above other recent stagings of the work.The Salzburg Festival attracts an audience of music and theater lovers from around the world. Yet its oldest tradition is a surprisingly local one.In 1920, the director Max Reinhardt and the writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal inaugurated the first Salzburg Festival with an outdoor production of “Jedermann,” an adaptation of a medieval morality play. The performance took place on the square in front of Salzburg’s imposing Baroque cathedral.“Jedermann” quickly became a festival fixture. Since the end of World War II, it has been performed here every summer, often with German-speaking acting luminaries tackling the title role of a wealthy and impious bon vivant who, in the prime of life, gets an unexpected visit from death. Faced with his mortality, the title character, whose name translates as Everyman, learns how fleeting fortune and fame are and undergoes a soul-saving conversion.This year, the play’s complete 14-performance run sold out well in advance — even though it is the only production at the festival that is performed without English supertitles.With this gripping new “Jedermann,” directed by Robert Carsen and starring the sensational Philipp Hochmair, it looks like it’s time for the festival to reverse that policy. This gutsy and moving production stands head and shoulders above Salzburg’s other recent stagings of the work, and deserves to be seen — and understood — by more than just the “Jedermann” die-hards.Every director who approaches “Jedermann” must contend with the play’s peculiarities, including the heightened dialogue, whose archaic touches and rhyming couplets make a naturalistic delivery all but impossible. Though a classic, “Jedermann” is not universally acknowledged as a masterpiece. The most successful “Jedermann” productions refrain from excavating subtle or hidden meanings and focus on bringing the play’s memorable episodes and characters to life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    At Salzburg Festival, Ancient Greek Tragedy Gets Modern Context

    At the Salzburg Festival, a new adaptation of “The Oresteia” will put a classic story of war, democracy and revenge into a modern context.Staging “The Oresteia,” Aeschylus’s epic Greek tragedy, is a daunting task for any theater company, especially if you add a dash of Sophocles and Euripides when portraying one of history’s most dysfunctional families.The Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Germany, will premiere its nearly four-hour production “Die Orestie” at the Salzburg Festival for eight performances Aug. 3-15 (and in Hamburg starting Oct. 30). It is adapted and directed by Nicolas Stemann, who has staged two plays at the festival: a nine-hour adaptation of Goethe’s “Faust” in 2011 and “Die Rauber” (“The Robbers”) by Friedrich Schiller in 2008.This production, which takes its name from the Aeschylus three-part epic and is to be performed in German with English supertitles, combines three playwrights’ versions of the tragedies that befall the fabled house of Atreus. In the Aeschylus play, first staged in 458 B.C., Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, returns from the Trojan War but is killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, to avenge the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia in an effort to win the war. Their son, Orestes, urged by the god Apollo, kills Clytemnestra, only to be pursued by the Furies, the goddesses of vengeance. Only when the goddess Athena intervenes is he granted justice and allowed to live.The Sophocles play “Electra” (its exact date is unknown, but most scholars put it around 420 to 414 or 416 B.C.) explores his sister’s revenge against their mother. And the Euripides play “Orestes,” first staged in 408 B.C., gives a more cynical take on his fate: Only after a bloody rampage and an intervention by Apollo are the condemned siblings allowed to live.In a video interview, Stemann discussed the challenge — and the excitement — of combining these nearly 2,500-year-old plays. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.Nicolas Stemann, who adapted and is the director of “Die Orestie” that will premiere at the Salzburg Festival in August.Diana PfammatWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More