Salzburg's pasticcio experiments

The 2025 festival is packed with intriguing surprises

Warlikowski’s ‘blockbuster’ Macbeth revived: Vladimir Sulimsky (Macbeth), Asmik Grigorian (Lady) Picture © SF/Bernd Uhlig

The 2025 Salzburg Festival programme, announced on Tuesday, offers a mouth-watering line-up of stage and concert works, though anyone expecting eye-catching big-name international casts may be disappointed. In his presentation at Salzburg’s Haus für Mozart, artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser hinted that a major new opera production had been postponed - but declined to say what it was or why. Even festivals as handsomely endowed as Salzburg (and with sky-high ticket prices) have to make economies on occasion.

I can only speculate, but the prized Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian - one of the festival’s biggest draws since her sensational debut in Salome in 2018 - told the Austrian press more than two years ago that her future roles would include Puccini’s Turandot at the Vienna State Opera (which took place last year) and, even more excitingly, Wagner’s Isolde in Salzburg during the summer of 2025. Whatever the reason for the postponement - if that is indeed what it is - Grigorian will instead reprise her acclaimed Lady Macbeth in a revival of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s admired ‘Russian mafia’ staging of Verdi’s opera, with substantially the same cast as when it was new in 2023.

As far as grand opera goes, Grigorian in Macbeth is the nearest thing Salzburg 2025 gets to a blockbuster. There’s no big Richard Strauss piece for the Vienna Philharmonic to get its teeth into. More surprisingly, perhaps, Mozart is represented not by one of his mature operatic masterpieces (invariably a festival staple) but by a concert performance of his youthful opera seria, Mitridate, re di Ponto, and a potentially fascinating experiment: a music-theatre evening built around the unfinished fragment know as Zaïde (given a subtitle, Der Weg des Lichts - The Way of Light). Mozart started writing this German-language opera in 1779, two years before his move to Vienna, in the hope that Emperor Joseph II would welcome a Singspiel for his recently founded German opera troupe. In the event, the composer’s first opera for Vienna was Die Entführung aus dem Serail on a similar theme.

Sabine Devieilhe sings the title role in an ‘experimental’ Zaïde. Picture © Anna Dabrowska

The numbers Mozart completed for Zaïde include a glorious aria for the heroine, ‘Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben’, but the score is uneven, so conductor Raphaël Pichon will place excerpts from the fragment alongside pieces extracted from the Italian oratorio Davidde Penitente, a recycling of the ‘Great’ Mass in C minor, and the incidental music to Thamos, König in Ägypten. The concept for this semi-staging is Pichon’s own with dramaturgical backup from Eddy Garaudel. The cast includes Sabine Devieilhe (Zaïde), Daniel Behle (Soliman) and Johannes Martin Kränzle (Allazim).

Three full-length music-dramas will provide more substantial fare, the most conspicuous being Handel’s Giulio Cesare in a staging by festival Regie-darling Dmitri Tcherniakov. Emmanuelle Haïm conducts her period band Le concert d’Astrée, and the cast is headed by Christian Dumaux and Olga Kulchynska as Caesar and Cleopatra. The summer programme also showcases the late Peter Eötvös’ opera Three Sisters, in which the female siblings will be sung by counter-tenors Dennis Orellana, Cameron Shahbazi and Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, and their sister-in-law Natasha by Kangmin Justin Kim. Evgeny Titov directs, while Maxime Pascal conducts Klangforum Wien. The third new production is Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda - a vehicle for Lisette Oropesa as the fated Scottish Queen, with Kate Lindsay as her nemesis, Elisabetta (Elizabeth I). Antonello Manacorda conducts a staging by Ulrich Rasche.

The veteran American director Peter Sellars will stage an intriguing, if brief, double-bill of Schoenberg’smonodrama Erwartung (sung by Ausrine Stundyte) paired with Mahler’s extended valedictory song from Das Lied von der Erde (Wiebke Lehmkuhl): the search for hidden ‘operas’ in Mahler’s output goes on.

Cecilia Bartoli sings Vivaldi Picture © Decca/Emanuele Scorcelletti

From the 2025 Whitsun Festival, Barrie Kosky’s Vivaldi pasticcio Hotel Metamorphosis (a vehicle for the Whitsun Festival’s artistic director Cecilia Bartoli) transfers to the summer festival, and the opera programme is completed by concert performances of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux (conducted by another Salzburg darling, musical badboy Theodor Currentzis) Andrea Chénier (starring Piotr Beczała and Luca Salsi), Salvatore Sciarrino’s Macbeth and Michael Jarrell’s monodrama Kassandra (spoken by Dagmar Manzel).

Artistic director Markus Hinterhäuser and director of concert programming Florian Wiegand Picture © SF/Bernd Uhlig

The concert programme announced by the departing director of concert programming, Florian Wiegand is a cherry-picker’s dream. Among the series of five ViennaPhilharmonic concerts, Riccardo Muti’s juxtaposition of Schubert’s C minor Symphony and Bruckner’s F minor Mass - with a fine quartet of mostly youthful soloists, including Britain’s William Thomas - looks inviting, while Lorenzo Viotti’s pairing of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex - Allan Clayton sings the title role, Christoph Waltz is Narrator - with Tchaikovsky’s F minor Symphony is a strong contender from a leading younger generation Italian maestro.

There is a Mahler thread through the visiting orchestras’ programmes: Currentzis’s Utopia offers the Fourth Symphony (Regula Mühlemann as soloist) and Klaus Mäkelä’s Royal Concertgebouw the Fifth, while the festival climaxes in grand style with Kirill Petrenko leading his Berliner Philharmonic in the Ninth.

Riccardo Muti conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in Schubert and Bruckner Picture © SF/Marco Borrelli

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of Shostakovich’s death, seven concerts feature his works. Another five honour the centenary of Pierre Boulez’s birth (though one of these consists entirely of Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a long-standing Boulez interpreter, playing selections from Book II of Bach’s Wohltemperierte Clavier).

Aimard is one of the 2025 festival’s select group of piano giants giving solo concerts: András Schiff (Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge), Daniil Trifonov (Chopin, Tchaikovsky), Evgeny Kissin (Bach, Chopin, Shostakovich), Grigory Sokolov (programme tba), Arcadi Volodos (Schubert), Igor Levitt (Schubert, Schumann, Chopin) and Víkingur Ólafsson (Beethoven, Bach).

Full details on the Salzburg Festival’s English-language website: www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/en/