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Waiting for Der Freischütz Bregenzer Festspiele, Bregenz (7 August 2025) Waiting for  Der fliegende Holländer   Oper im Steinbruch ,  St. Margarethen  (8 August 2025) If there is another country in the world besides Italy where opera is held in such high esteem today, it must be Austria. Much like in Italy, opera reaches the masses in Austria during the summer months through open-air festivals. Around the same time as the Salzburg Festival — the oldest and arguably the world's most prestigious performing arts organisation — two open-air opera festivals take place in July and August, this year one for the 79th time and the other for the 29th: Bregenzer Festspiele (Bregenz Festival) and Oper im Steinbruch (Opera in the Quarry), formerly known as Opernfestspiele St. Margarethen (St. Margarethen Opera Festival). Both festivals boast exceptional venues: the first is on the water, on the shores of Lake Constance; the second is in the countryside, in a Roman-era quarry at t...

© Annemie Augustijns Friday  Friday, 15th December 2023, the premiere evening of The Pearl Hunters, staged by the Flemish Opera and Ballet in Antwerp's 1907 opera house. The red curtain is closed. On either side of the front stage, there are formica tables and chairs. An old man is sitting in one of them. The conductor arrives, and the applause ends. The first note of the prelude is a hard beat. Just during this beat, the man's head falls into the plate in front of him. At that moment, the curtain opens upwards to reveal a grey, cold dining hall. Old people are sitting, and nurses are walking around in an unpleasant nursing home. During the prelude, two nurses arrive on a stretcher and take the deceased person away. After that, the opening chorus featuring an oriental melody follows. It is sung by a choir aged with make-up; the elderly, like pearl hunters defying death, are one step closer to death every moment, but they resist death with every moment they live. Meanwhile, on t...

© Annemie Augustijns The famous opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny , in short Mahagonny , with the libretto by Bertolt Brecht and music by Kurt Weill, tells the story of a city where, if paid for, there are no rules for entertainment (food, sex, boxing and drink), everything is permitted for entertainment. In this artificial city, people are prevented from realizing that their lives are empty and meaningless by spending their time with entertainment, so much that people are made to forget that they are human by dulling their feelings. So, the plot of the Mahagonny can be read as a critique of American society, so Mahagonny may represent Las Vegas, for example, or it may also describe the corrupted Berlin of the 1920s of the Weimar Republic. Mahagonny, which premiered in Leipzig in 1930, was the culmination of a six-year partnership between Brecht and Weill. Like all cult and timeless works, it was met with protests (organized by sympathizers of the National Socialist ...

The 74th Holland Festival, which continued throughout June, ended with the livestream of the music-theatre named TIME by the famous Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of the associate artists of this year's edition, on 27th June.  TIME , a joint project of the Holland Festival - Amsterdam, deSingel - Antwerp and the International Manchester Festival, had its world premiere on 18th June at Gashouder-Westergas, which was converted from one of Amsterdam's old gasworks into a culture and events centre.  © Sanne Peper A woman blows a flute-like instrument and walks slowly across the stage filled with ankle leveled water. An hour later she passes again blowing the same instrument, but this time making more painful screams than before. The water through which she passes is no longer the clear water as before. There are dry branches in the water, stones of compacted earth, and there is a man's body in the water, bent like a rock. In the realm of a dream that lasted 100 year...