The program for the 2024 Salzburg Festival has been announced. Two operas based on Dostoevsky’s novels will be shown

The program for the 2024 Salzburg Festival has been announced. Among the premieres are two famous Russian-language operas of the 20th century based on Dostoevsky’s novels. This has never happened in Salzburg in the past, but in current conditions such a software solution looks truly deafening, admits Sergei Khodnev.

Neither Sergei Prokofiev’s The Gambler (1916) nor Moses (Mieczyslaw) Weinberg’s The Idiot (1986) had ever been staged in Salzburg before. “The Idiot” – which, given the composer’s Polish origins, is more or less expected – will be taken on by one of the obvious Salzburg favorites, director Krzysztof Warlikowski, along with his already familiar team (artist Małgorzata Szczesniak, playwright Christian Longchamp). The Lithuanian Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, whose international career began in Salzburg with her victory at the competition for young conductors in 2012, will make her debut as stage director. Prince Myshkin will be sung by Bogdan Volkov, and Nastasya Filippovna and Rogozhin are assigned, respectively, to Aushrina Stundite (the title role in the Salzburg Elektra, again by Warlikowski, 2020) and Vladislav Sulimsky, the star of the best opera production of Salzburg 2023 – Verdi’s Macbeth, where the director was the same eminent Polish director.

The music of Weinberg (1919–1996) is known to a wide domestic audience from Kalatozov’s film “The Cranes Are Flying” and from the classic Soviet cartoons about Winnie the Pooh and Boniface the Lion, but Weinberg as an opera composer is, by and large, a discovery of the 2010s, when his “Passenger” ” and “The Idiot” began to be fully performed on Russian and Western stages for the first time. With Prokofiev’s The Gambler, which was first staged in Brussels back in 1929, everything is different; Of the high-profile theatrical versions of the 21st century, one can recall at least the production by Dmitry Chernyakov in Berlin (2008). But Peter Sellars was invited to Salzburg to stage Prokofiev’s opera. The decision is unexpected: the long-standing merits of the great American postmodernist are undeniable, but still, his Salzburg works of the last decade (“The Clemency of Titus” and “Idomeneo”) left a strong feeling that, euphemistically speaking, the director’s creative spring had passed, and not yesterday or even the day before . However, who knows: suddenly Sellars will mystically work especially successfully not with Teodor Currentzis, as before, but with the Russian conductor Timur Zangiev, who is releasing The Player. The team of soloists this time is emphatically international: Hasmik Grigoryan (Polina) will be accompanied by Chinese bass Chen Peixing (General), Indian-American tenor Sean Panikar (Alexey), who once sang with Krzysztof Warlikowski in the Salzburg production of Henze’s “Bassarid,” and the favorite of the aforementioned Dmitry Chernyakov, Lithuanian prima Violeta Urmana (Granny).

The third premiere of next year’s Salzburg summer will be Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, directed by the Frenchwoman Mariam Clément with Mark Minkowski conducting. The Mozart quota required for the festival will be made up, firstly, of La Clemenza di Titus, staged by Robert Carsen, which, according to established tradition, will “move” to the summer program after the May premiere at the Salzburg Pentecost Festival (Pfingstfestspiele), where Cecilia will sing the role of Sextus Bartoli. And secondly, the revival of Don Giovanni staged by Romeo Castellucci (2021), where Donna Anna will again be sung by the famous soloist of the Perm Opera Nadezhda Pavlova, and Teodor Currentzis will again conduct. Only it will no longer be the musicAeterna orchestra, as in 2021, that will be located in the pit, but Currentzis’ new showcase group Utopia – so that the festival, God forbid, is not suspected of collaborating with the Russian banking structures sponsoring Mr. Currentzis.

Canadian Robert Carsen will also become the first non-Austrian director to present his version of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s mystery “The Name” this year. This is already quite sensitive, since “The Name,” which is shown in the open air right on the steps of the Salzburg Cathedral, is an arch-traditional part of the festival, its shrine and talisman. But we must add to this that the curator of the entire Salzburg drama program from the coming year is the Russian critic, theater critic and director Marina Davydova. How the Austro-German press will accept all these steps of the Salzburg intendant Markus Hinterhäuser is a question. But still, how exactly the “Dostoevsky” theme will be given to the masters of the socially accusatory genre Sellars and Warlikovsky is a much more fascinating matter. And unpredictable.