Miskolc, once a centre of heavy industry under communism, has become well known for its Bartók + ... opera festival, which it is organising for the ninth time this year. Bartók is always on the festival bill, but a different composer or theme shares the spotlight each year.
The festival will open with a performance of L'infedeltá delusa, which Haydn wrote while he was the court musician for Hungary's Esterházy family. Erika Miklósa will sing accompanied by the Austrian-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra.
Several of Mozart's operas will be on the festival programme. In addition to The Marriage of Figaro, performed by the Bucharest National Opera, Mozart's opera Apollo and Hyacinthus, will be sung by Moscow's Helikon Opera, and Bastien et Bastienne, which Mozart composed when he was just twelve years old, will be performed with the cooperation of the Musica Iuvenalis ensemble from Kosice, Slovakia. The music school of the University of Szeged will bring the rarely seen L'oca del Cairo to the stage.
The Bratislava National Theatre will bring Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos to the festival, and the director Giorgio Pressburger will stage a premiere of Schönberg's Moses and Aaron with Hungary's National Philharmonic Orchestra.
Other operas on the programme are Alban Berg's Lulu, which Hungarian audiences have not had a chance to see in 50 years. The German Gerai State Theatre will perform Berg's other great opera, Woyzeck, in Miskolc.
Of course, the festival would not be complete without a production of Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, by the National Theatre of Szeged, directed Tamás Juronics.
The festival programme will feature the Hungarian premiere of some works, among them Schönberg's Moses and Aaron, with the National Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Zoltán Kocsis.
Students of the Theatre and Film Arts Academy will perform Schönberg's three-act prose work Der biblischer Weg.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism, a special performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 as well as excerpts from Fidelio will be performed with the cooperation of several theatres.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
Photo: Eszter Gordon, MTI
