The New York Times
By Anthony Tommasini
SALZBURG, Austria — Speaking to reporters about the Salzburg Festival’s new production of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea,” one of its stars, the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey, described the “incredible freedom” this prestigious festival provided the staging. Young dancers, Ms. Lindsey said, were “the heart of the show.”
“They worked intensively for three weeks before we showed up,” she added. “And we all warmed up together before every rehearsal. We don’t get that in many productions, if ever.”
Festivals provide a break from the routines that opera companies and orchestras contend with during the regular season. Salzburg has a budget of more than $72 million to support just six weeks of programming, which allows daring from its director, the pianist and impresario Markus Hinterhäuser, who took over last summer.
Asked to describe his job in an interview at his office here, Mr. Hinterhäuser emphasized that since the festival’s efficient operational structure needs little of his help, he can focus on “what we present, how we present it, and the kind of static we create.”
“Art isn’t art without form,” he added. Giving the festival form is his mission.
But form at Salzburg can take different, well, forms. Mr. Hinterhäuser’s taste seems to hark back to the tumultuous 1990s tenure of the impresario Gerard Mortier, who arrived with an agenda: to jolt a festival that, to his mind, had grown elitist and stultified during the long reign of the conductor Herbert von Karajan. Mortier presented in-your-face productions of staples like “Così Fan Tutte” and “Die Fledermaus,” commissioned a raft of new works, brought in guest orchestras to nudge the Vienna Philharmonic from its place of primacy and oversaw extensive programs of contemporary music.
Of course, there are givens at Salzburg that no director dares tamper with, like accommodating star performers. Plácido Domingo, a regular, chose this summer’s festival to introduce his 150th role: Zurga, in a concert performance of Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers.” But Mr. Hinterhäuser is keen on encouraging artists to think beyond tradition.
“A musical score is not written in stone,” he said. Every performance should be a “re-look,” an interpretation. Re-examining repertory in the context of the “now and today,” as he put it, is central.
Mr. Hinterhäuser pointed to Lydia Steier, whose production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” inspired by the film “The Princess Bride,” framed the opera as a bedtime story told by the crinkle-eyed grandfather of a Viennese family just before World War I; his three young grandsons become, in their imaginations, Mozart’s three boys.
Ms. Steier was offering audiences an “interpretation,” Mr. Hinterhäuser said, and asking them simply to come along with her for a few hours as she retold the work. Mr. Hinterhäuser intends to revive the production, with some staging tweaks, in 2020. He considers Romeo Castellucci’s production of Richard Strauss’s “Salome” to be the most “radical” of this summer’s offerings, because the director dared to probe the murky psychological depths of this still-disturbing opera — even when the resulting stage imagery, however mesmerizing, was baffling.
Mr. Hinterhäuser’s most provocative comments, though, concerned the role of commissions. You would expect a daring artist to be eager to present new works. But he said that citing the number of premieres as “proof of artistic vision and daring” can be “a little bit too easy,” even “superficial.” He said it’s just as important, and maybe even more so, to reconsider slightly earlier works — especially, it would seem by his choices so far, a generation of composers active in the second half of the 20th century, like Claude Vivier, Giacinto Scelsi, Galina Ustvolskaya and Gérard Grisey.