Of the eleven new music theatre works to be released at Oper Frankfurt in the 2023/24 season, five have never been performed in the city. All in all, the programme presented by Bernd Loebe on Wednesday once again shows the stylistically diverse mixture of the known and the unknown, which is characteristic of his directorship.
Guido Holze
Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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The first premiere of the season will be Gaetano Donizetti's "Don Pasquale" on 23 September at the Bockenheim Depot in the production by Caterina Panti Liberovici, which had already been rehearsed up to the dress rehearsal but could then no longer be performed due to the pandemic.
The new General Music Director Thomas Guggeis will have his inaugural premiere on 1 October with Mozart's "Le nozze di Figaro". The 30-year-old conductor will also conduct the Frankfurt premiere of György Ligeti's "Le Grand Macabre". Loebe thanked his predecessor Sebastian Weigle for 15 years of "wonderful cooperation".
For the first time in a very long time, Verdi's "Aida" is being staged again in Frankfurt, 43 years after the legendary production by Hans Neuenfels. There will certainly be no production in Egyptian garb this time either, Loebe promised, especially since director Lydia Steier tends to polarize.
One would not suspect that there is a stage work by Mozart that has never been seen in Frankfurt before. But his early work "Ascanio in Alba" will actually be premiered here at the Bockenheim Depot. The opera makes an excursion into the cheerful genre with the opéra bouffe "Die Banditen" by Jacques Offenbach, which has also never been performed in Frankfurt.
Other rarities will be followed by "Der Traumgörge" by Alexander Zemlinsky and the opera "In seinen Garten liebt Don Perlimplín Belisa" based on Federico Garcia Lorca by Wolfgang Fortner.
In Handel's "Giulio Cesare in Egitto", Pretty Yende, the sought-after South African soprano, will make her role debut as Cleopatra.
Guggeis will introduce himself as a Wagner conductor with "Tannhäuser" before the grand opéra "La Juive" by Fromental Halévy is staged as the last premiere of the season on 16 June 2024.
Among other things, Christof Loy's award-winning production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "The Night Before Christmas" will be revived.
In total, Oper Frankfurt is offering 450 events in the next season. These include 178 musical theatre performances and more than 260 special events, 200 of which are part of the "Now!" educational programme for babies, children, young people, families and opera beginners. A new offer for the homeless has been added. The recitals are already established, and in 2023/24 there will again be eight, designed by Paula Murrihy, Christiane Karg and John Osborne, among others.
The occupancy rate of the opera is currently at 82 percent, which is "as high as before Corona," Loebe said happily. However, there are still 3200 fewer subscribers than before the pandemic, when their number remained fairly constant at around 12,000 for many years.
However, this will be compensated financially by growth in single ticket sales. The self-imposed goal of raising 8.2 million euros through ticket sales will be exceeded by the opera at the end of the current season.