The festival programme will feature the Hungarian premiere of some works, among them Schönberg's Moses and Aaron, directed by Giorgio Pressburger.
The compositions of Hadyn will feature prominently on the programme of Bartók+Vienna 2009, this being the Haydn anniversary year, said festival director Támas Bátor. 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. The opera is directed by György Vashegyi. The Austrian-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra will play under Stefan Vladar, who will conduct from the piano.
Moscow's Helikon Theatre company will return to the festival, bringing with them this year productions of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri as well as Mozart's early piece Apollo and Hyacinthus on one evening and Alban Berg's Lulu - which Hungairan audiences have not had a chance to see in 50 years - on another, Bátor said. The German Gerai State Theatre will perform Berg's other great opera, Woyzeck, in Miskolc.
Schönberg's Moses and Aaron will be directed by Giorgio Pressburger, who has Hungarian roots, and conducted by Zoltán Kocsis.
Pressburger said he had dreamed of directing the opera for 40 years.
Students of the Theatre and Film Arts Academy will perform Schönberg's three-act prose work Der biblischer Weg directed by László Gálffi.
The Warsaw Chamber Opera will participate at the festival with The Emperor of Atlantis by Viktor Ullmann, who was a student of Schönberg and an assistant to Zemlinksy. The piece is not entirely unknown to Hungarian audiences: the Budapest Festival Orchestra played it at the Mahler Festival in Budapest in 2007.
State secretary at the Ministry of Education and Culture Márta Schneider said the ministry would contribute HUF 70 million toward the support of the festival, the same amount as last year, in spite of spending cutbacks because of the economic crisis.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
