Two centenaries, Duke Ellington’s and Francis Poulenc’s, are getting plenty of attention, in some spectacular spaces. Movements from Ellington’s “Sacred Concerts” are on the opening-night program at Britain’s Three Choirs Festival (Aug. 21-27; www.3choirs.org) in Worcester Cathedral; Poulenc’s shattering “Dialogues of the Carmelites” will be staged in Olavinlinna Castle at Finland’s Savonlinna Festival (July 3-Aug. 1; www.operafestival.fi). A festival note warns: “Castle passages and floors are uneven, so wear stout shoes.”
Summer festivals never shy away from death, either. This year they’ll mark the 150th anniversary of the demise of Chopin and of Johann Strauss, the 50th of an unrelated Strauss, Richard, and the 10th of conductor Herbert von Karajan. It’s also a summer of completeness. You may have missed all the Schoenberg string quartets in Prague, but you’re not too late for all the Beethoven symphonies at San Sebastian’s Quincena festival (Aug. 4-Sept. 5), or, beginning on Sept. 3 at the Berlin Festival Weeks, every hiccup Mahler set to music.
Though broadly based festivals are the rule, there’s plenty for specialists, from Bayreuth (July 25-Aug. 28)–which is all Wagner all the time, though without a “Ring” cycle this year–to the Baroque offerings at Beaune in France (July 2-Aug. 1). There are Celtic cadences in Lorient, on the coast of Brittany (Aug. 6-15), with a parade of 3,500 musicians, singers and dancers. Among the best of the festival bunch:
Two unusual 20th-century operas are on the bill at Austria’s Bregenz Festival (July 20-Aug. 23; www.bregenzerfestspiele.com). It’s an especially interesting–some might say ironic–site for the staging of Grigori Frid’s one-woman work, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” which Israeli soprano Anat Efraty will sing. Bohuslav Martinu’s “The Greek Passion” will be performed, for the first time ever, in its original 1957 version. Ales Brezina, a Martinu scholar, has reconstructed the work, which is based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel “Christ Recrucified.”
That pastoral paradise, Glyndebourne, just a picnic-hamper’s throw away from London, is staging six operas (through Aug. 29). Among the more standard fare–Mozart, Puccini–is a piece Glyndebourne commissioned: “Flight,” by composer Jonathan Dove and librettist April de Angelis, is set in an airport where passengers are sitting out a storm.
Thirty-five years ago the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter founded the Touraine festival near Tours, France. This summer (June 25-July 1) the air will be filled with Mendelssohn and more Mendelssohn, whom Schumann compared to Mozart, and Liszt compared to Bach. It’s not just Felix who gets a hearing, however, but his gifted and often overlooked sister, Fanny.
New music rules at Cheltenham (July 3-18; www.cheltenhamfestivals.co.uk/music), with 13 premieres. The emphasis is on homegrown talent–all the Elgar symphonies (including Anthony Payne’s masterly completion of the composer’s final symphony), a trumpet quintet by Peter Maxwell Davies, Britten’s powerful opera “The Rape of Lucretia” and a string quartet by Harrison Birtwistle. If a steady English diet is too much for you to digest, dig into the delectable oboe concerto by Richard Strauss, or “Play It Again, Samba!” a percussion workshop.
Drottningholm, Stockholm’s 1766 jewel box of a theater (July 10-Sept. 4; www.drottningholmsteatern.dtm.se), is the site of the world premiere of “The Garden,” an opera by one of Sweden’s native sons, Jonas Forssell, about another, Carolus Linnaeus, the renowned 18th-century naturalist who invented the modern system of naming flora and fauna.
At Salzburg (July 24-Aug. 29; www.salzburg.com/festspiele), one of the most beautiful and pricey stops on the circuit, there’s a Faustian face-off. Ferruccio Busoni’s seldom-performed “Doctor Faust,” with the magnificent baritone Thomas Hampson in the title role, comes up against Berlioz’s “The Damnation of Faust” with mezzo-soprano Vesselina Kasarova as Marguerite. If you get to Salzburg, do what you must for tickets to Schubert’s “Winterreise” with baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Alfred Brendel.
If you can’t get enough opera in the winter, camp out in Munich for a month. The opera festival (June 30-July 31; www.bayerische.staatsoper.de) has scheduled 14 works, including an outdoor performance of “Aida” and a new production of “Otello” by controversial director Francesca Zambello. The festival highlight: three operas by Munich’s own Richard Strauss, including “Der Rosenkavalier” with a dynamite international cast: American Renee Fleming, Sweden’s Anne Sofie von Otter, Rebecca Evans of Wales and Germany’s Kurt Moll.
At the Schleswig-Holstein festival (July 11-Aug. 29; www.shmf.de), the repertoire, from 16th-century songs to new orchestral work whose ink may still be wet, is as enormous and varied as the venues–concert halls, churches, even stables, in more than 30 towns and cities. The festival’s focal points this year are Goethe and French music. There’s plenty of star power but young musicians are equally important here. Master classes (open to the public) include not just violin, cello and piano but organ and saxophone. Best of all, one of the century’s greatest mezzos, Christa Ludwig, is leading one on opera singing and acting. Who knows? You might discover the next Callas.
