The critical editions published by Bärenreiter/Alkor will be used at prominent festivals at home and abroad this summer too.

Some of the editions at the Salzburg Festival, for example, include the staged new production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and two concertante performances of Bizet’s “Les pêcheurs de perles! with Placido Domingo in the part of Zurga. Special tribute will be paid to Beat Furrer, who was awarded the Siemens Music Prize in May, with a concert series devoted to the composer’s works. The lake stage in Bregenz will see a performance of Kasper Holten’s spectacular production of Bizet’s “Carmen” (photo: Karl Forster) again this year, while Brigitte Fassbaender will be staging Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” at the Theater am Kornmarkt with prizewinners of the singing competition “Neue Stimmen”. Those who missed Barrie Kosky’s novel realisation of George Frideric Handel’s “Saul” in Southern England’s Glyndebourne in 2015 will have the chance to see and listen to it this year, among the singers the star countertenor Iestyn Davies as David.

More festival events : “[t]akte” 1/2018 (link on the right)

The Salzburg Festival is devoting the concert series “Zeit mit Furrer” (Time with Furrer) to the works of the Austro-Swiss composer Beat Furrer (photo: Manu Theobald / EvS Musikstiftung). Four concerts will feature the works of the artist, who was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2018. His music theatre “Begehren” takes up the Orpheus myth: a dialogue of the unreachability between man and woman who cannot hear each other. Under the baton of the composer, the Klangforum Wien, the vocal ensemble Cantando Admont and soloists will be interpreting this powerful work on 30 July 2018. Instrumental dialogue is also the focus of the chamber music in the concert on the following day, with “ira-arca” for flute and double bass, “invocation VI” for soprano and bass flute and “intorno al bianco” for clarinet and string quartet. “Zeit mit Furrer”’ will be concluded on 6 August by a special interpretation of the “Wüstenbuch”: scenes of the music theatre will be combined with the actress Isabel Karajan reading fragments from the “Todesarten-Projekt”, a text source of Beat Furrer’s “Wüstenbuch”.

More information: www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/concert/time-with-furrer-2018

A German opera in a cosmopolitan spirit, that is Gaspare Spontini’s opera “Agnes von Hohenstaufen” premiered in 1827 in Berlin. Now the Theater Erfurt is taking on this spectacular work.