After Rome and Seville in the past years, Artistic Director Cecilia Bartoli continues her imaginary city trips as part of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival from 6 to 9 June 2025, focusing on the sounds of the lagoon city of Venice, its light and lightness, in her programme.
Cecilia Bartoli has chosen Antonio Vivaldi’s music as the focus of the festival’s new staged production, photo SF
Hotel Metamorphosis
World Premiere of an Opera Pasticcio with Music by Antonio Vivaldi
The 22 operas by Antonio Vivaldi that have come down to us were long forgotten, but enjoy immense popularity again today. Cecilia Bartoli initiated this remarkable 20th-century rediscovery. However, she has waited until now to tread the stage in a Vivaldi production, choosing a newly created evening of musical theatre she has assembled, together with conductor Gianluca Capuano and director Barrie Kosky, from Vivaldi’s most beautiful arias, ensembles and choruses, in the manner of a baroque “pasticcio”.
Baroque arias offer an exemplary view of a certain emotional state – joy, grief, love, rage – and therefore have always been strung together like pearls on a new string when a group of outstanding singers got together to prove their mettle by performing them. In Barrie Kosky’s words, Ovid’s Metamorphoses display “a panoply of human emotions”. These varied stories are eminently suited for a pasticcio: the Hotel Metamorphosis is a place of encounter for famous characters of classical mythology.
Hotel Metamorphosis is the first collaboration between Barrie Kosky, Gianluca Capuano and Cecilia Bartoli. The cast also includes three outstanding Vivaldi performers, Philippe Jaroussky, Lea Desandre and Varduhi Abrahamyan, one of the great actresses of the German language, Angela Winkler, and the orchestra Les Musiciens du Prince – Monaco, which has caused a sensation in Salzburg regularly during the past years, performing on historical instruments.
Cecilia Bartoli, Artistic Director of the Salzburg Whitsun Festival since 2012, has chosen the sounds of the lagoon city of Venice, its light and lightness, as the focus of her programme, photo SF
Speaking about the world premiere and the personal premiere it represents for her, Cecilia Bartoli says:
“In 1999, the release of my first Vivaldi album launched the worldwide, enthusiastic recognition of Antonio Vivaldi as a serious opera composer. For the first time, one could hear Vivaldi arias on a CD featuring only first recordings. Shortly thereafter, the label Opus 111 began its now-famous series of recordings of Vivaldi’s complete operas. Today, his oeuvre has found its place in the regular opera house repertoire. Almost 20 years after the first CD, my second Vivaldi album came out, so that I have recorded one of the most beautiful numbers from each of the operas that have come down to us. Since, however, I have never been able to perform a Vivaldi opera on stage so far, I had the idea of creating a pasticcio for Salzburg, a world premiere paying homage to all these masterworks at once! It will be sung and played by some of the best musicians active in this field today.”
Barrie Kosky, photo SF/Jan Windszus Photography
Director Barrie Kosky describes the new production:
“Hotel Metamorphosis tells five stories of love and desire from Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses using vocal and instrumental music from Antonio Vivaldi. The stories are the visions and memories of Orpheus lamenting the loss of his beloved wife and his inability to live without her. The music of Vivaldi becomes the songs and melodies of Orpheus as he weaves mythology, ritual, nature and fantasy into a meditation on love and loss. The stories of Pygmalion, Arachne, Myrrha, Narcissus and Echo and Orpheus and Eurydice are sung, acted and danced by an extraordinary ensemble of singers, actors, dancers and musicians.”
Gianluca Capuano, photo SF/Gianandrea Uggetti
Conductor Gianluca Capuano: “Rarely has a composer been identified to such a degree with a city as Vivaldi with Venice. In Vivaldi’s music, we hear the sounds of La Serenissima, we enjoy the light pouring through the calli and onto the surface of the canals. As if in an endless interplay of change and reflection, the light makes the Venetian palaces glow, they are mirrored in the ubiquitous water, and the water itself reflects its lights onto the visitor, who loses himself in an unreal, almost otherworldly atmosphere. Come hear the great Venetian’s greatest arias, delve into this glowing sound with us: Venice awaits you in Salzburg!”
Set design for Hotel Metamorphosis, photo Michael Levine
Hotel Metamorphosis is a pasticcio for our times.
With this production, Cecilia Bartoli returns once again to an artist to whose reassessment as an opera composer she made a significant contribution as early as 1999, when her legendary Vivaldi Album appeared.
In addition, Cecilia Bartoli pays homage to one of the great ballet institutions of the 20th century: John Neumeier and the Hamburg Ballet.
Death in Venice
John Neumeier’s free adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella Tod in Venedig was created for the dancers of the Hamburg Ballet. Neumeier calls his ballet “a love story about life”. His interpretation focuses on the figure of the master choreographer Gustav von Aschenbach. David Fray performs the piano part.
John Neumeier shared 50 years of symbiotic collaboration with the Hamburg Ballet, which even bore his name for a time. During this period, the company performed six times in Venice; at the Teatro La Fenice, of course, but also in the Piazza San Marco. John Neumeier is reviving the ballet Death in Venice in Salzburg, as part of an extensive retrospective marking the end of his artistic directorship. Neumeier draws on music by Bach and Wagner to build the bridges between eras and art forms that are so characteristic of his work.
(After Press materials)
Marijan Zlobec
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